Missing mines show all is not necessarily well

摘要

"AS DRYBLOWER was going up the stairs he met a nickel mine that wasn't there, he met it there again today, oh how he wishes that nickel mine would go away." With apologies to the late William Hughes Mearns, the man credited with an immortal nonsense poem for children about a man on the stairs who wasn't there, Dryblower admits to a fascination with the concept of things that we cannot see - such as mothballed mines. Why, you might reasonably ask, would anyone care about something that is closed, mothballed, or downsized? The answer is as simple as the earth's geology - it never really goes away. The metals in the ground that once formed the basis of mines such as the Ravensthorpe nickel mine, and the Lennard Shelf zinc mines, are still there. Only the men and women digging and processing the ore have gone away.