MonInfo reports: While being lowered down into the bowels of the Gobi desert in an oversized concrete bucket, a deep rumbling from beneath kept all eight of us just tense enough to keep our mouths shut and watch the cement walls rush by.

“It’s just the mucker,” our Mongolian guide said. “Right now we’re 551 meters beneath the surface of the earth. Want to see the bottom?”

In a dimly light hole in the middle of nowhere Mongolian civil movement officers, members of the media and exploration shaft construction workers from Mongolia and Canada had a chat, 551 meters beneath the Gobi’s golden sands.

“So how do you dig down and take all the rock out,” an inquiring mind asked while looking at black rock hundreds of millions of years old.

A construction project like exploration shaft #1 at Ivanhoe Mines Ltd Oyu Tolgoi project has yet to be done in Mongolia, officials explained.

Copping and modifying a famous line from American TV, an Ivanhoe official said it was, “Going where no Mongolian has gone before.”

During a presentation in one of Ivanhoe’s “weather havens,” earlier in the morning, more than a few faces looked puzzled as terms like, “block-cave, water aquifer, exploration shaft and world’s largest undeveloped copper-gold project,” were discussed while near 3-dimensional geological maps and mining development plans flashed on a projection screen.

However, this was the entire reason why this group of of civil movement members, journalists and politicians had hopped on a charter flight in Ulaanbaatar at 6:30am, escaping snow flurries to fly to the Gobi.

After touring mining sites in the United States for two weeks on an educational tour, the group was ready to see what was going on in their own backyard, equipped with first hand knowledge of large exploration and mining projects. Read more at www.moninfo.org/content/view/312/75/lang,en/
All images copyright Luke Distelhorst.