Northeastern Minnesota has made its mark on the world through its contribution of iron ore and taconite.

Now it may be on the verge of making an even deeper mark...as it explores the possibilities of harvesting its non-ferrous metals.

George Kessler takes a look at what went on in the earth's crust to allow the reaping of this geological bounty.

The Iron part of the Range was only just the beginning.

A little over a billion years ago Northern Minnesota was a happening place- geologically speaking at least.

A plume of magma rose from the Earth's mantle and intruded into the layers just below the surface before hardening into solid rock.

This wasn't just an ordinary blob of rock though- it was rich in metals.

This is one of the biggest reserves that has been known for years, but has never been developed, and has real potential.

Copper, Cobalt, Nickel, Titanium, Palladium, Platinum and yes, Gold, were deposited beneath the Range.

This feature is collectively known as the Duluth Complex, and was discovered in the years following WW II.

"So if we've been literally sitting on a gold mine all this time, why hasn't there been a stampede of grizzled '49ers beating a path to our door?"

Well... gold mining isn't as easy as it was in the good old days. Back then if you had a pick, pan or shovel you were in business.

The mule was optional.

These days it's a lot harder- the big deposits are gone, but thanks to some modern ingenuity it's possible to profitably mine small concentrations.

How small?

You'd have to process one ton of rock to get enough gold to make a solitary paper clip.

As much fun as it is to talk about gold, the real wealth of the Duluth Complex is copper and nickel.

Although less glamorous, these metals are in just about everything we use on a day-to-day basis, and there are hundreds of thousands of tons of the stuff locked up beneath the Range.

We have a very good technology, that has been developed and refined over the past 20 or 30 years, to be able to recover all of the metals without sending all of the pollutants up into the air.

Polymet was the first company to start the permitting process for a copper-nickel mine on the site of the old LTV property outside of Hoyt Lakes.

Their proposed operation will mine one of many copper-nickel deposits that geologists have located, shown by the red areas on this map.

When up and running, the mine is expected to annually produce 36,000 tons of copper, 7,700 tons of nickel and 106,000 ounces of precious metals including platinum, palladium and yes, gold. If that sounds like a lot to you, you're right.

This one mine will be enough to satisfy between 2 and 6% of the annual American demand for each of these metals, and replace material that would otherwise be imported.

Currently we import over 2-million tons of copper a year.

So if there are billions of dollars just sitting in the ground, why hasn't it been mined already?

Simply put, the technology just wasn't there to extract the ore profitably.

These sample drill cores illustrate the problem.

The golden-hued metallic bits are copper-sulfide, but the rest of what you see is waste rock.

The trick is how to cleanly and economically extract the ore, which is only a small fraction of the total material that will be mined.

It's a complicated process but experts say well-worth the effort.
On the Iron Range, George Kessler, the Northland's News Center.

Thursday George will take a look at how they're going for the gold and the rest of the valuable metals.