John McMullin, geologist at the Geological Services Davison of the Nova Scotia Dept. of Natural Resources, send CMJ a most though-provoking comment after reading yesterday's item about the resource estimate at Temex Resources' Gowganda silver project. First, he noted that the editor had mistakenly giving a grade in g/t Ag (gold) instead of Au (silver). That has been corrected.
He went on, asking why we note gold grades in grams/tonne and contained gold as ounces. The short answer is because the majority of our readers do it the same way. His reasoning is thus:
"A tonne of gold might be worth about $49 million and even a kilogram at maybe $49,000 might be too rich for most folk. However, gold quoted at $49.xx per gram would make much more sense to the average geologist when he or she is reading grades and reserves in metric and wants to put a quick value on the reserves. I'm sure most miners around the world are using metric. It's high time the currency markets started using something more modern than troy ounces to quote prices.