Why Outback South Australia Is Sitting On The Most Valuable Land In Human History

Under a patch of flat scrub in northern South Australia, with nothing on the surface to show for it, sits the single most valuable orebody ever found. It holds the largest known uranium resource in any deposit on Earth, one of the largest copper resources anywhere, plus gold and silver as by-products — all in the same rock, buried under 300 metres of cover. No outcrop. No discoloured ground. Nothing visible at all. It was found in 1975 by a crew working from a gravity anomaly and a theory, on their tenth hole, with the budget nearly gone. And that's one deposit in a state that also supplies around 90% of the world's precious opal, sits on top of groundwater that fell as rain two million years ago, ran a grid that has generated more than its entire demand from wind and sun, and holds the only golden spike defining a period of geological time anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere. This is 25 facts about what's actually underneath outback South Australia — from the Gawler Craton to opalised plesiosaurs to the town that lives underground to the battery in a paddock near Jamestown that changed grid economics on every continent. Nothing about it was designed. A block of crust just stopped being recycled, and things accumulated. CHAPTERS 0:00 The Orebody With Nothing on the Surface 1:10 25–24: The Gawler Craton and 1.6 Billion Years 2:22 23–22: Found on the Tenth Hole 4:04 21–20: A Third of the World's Uranium 5:18 19–18: Water That Fell Before Humans Existed 6:13 17–16: Mound Springs and a Century of Loss 7:29 15: Fossil Water vs the Biggest Mine 8:07 14–13: Coober Pedy and the Town That Lives Underground 9:16 12–11: The Eromanga Sea and Opalised Plesiosaurs 11:05 10–9: Woomera and Australia's First Satellite 12:09 8: Maralinga 12:52 7–6: The Grid and the 2016 Blackout 13:47 5–4: Hornsdale, Copper and Rare Earths 15:13 3: The Ediacaran Golden Spike 15:54 2: Kati Thanda and the Birds Nobody Can Explain 16:47 1: One Accident, Repeated Tell me in the comments which one