PIXELS, NOT PICKAXES.

This article discusses how Nicolas Archibald responded to a global challenge to researchers by Canadian mining company Goldcorp Inc. to find gold at an old mine in northern Ontario. When a Canadian mining company issued a global challenge to researchers in 2000 to find gold at an old mine in northern Ontario, Nicholas Archibald knew this was an opportunity not to be missed. But instead of pulling out his prospecting gear and heading into the bush at Goldcorp Inc.'s Red Lake property, the geologist, who'd never been to Canada, stayed home -- on the other side of the world in West Perth, Australia. There, he and his team flicked on their computers and downloaded data posted on the Goldcorp website. That initiative would eventually put Archibald in the position he's in now: with a small group of geologists, geophysicists, geochemists and geological modellers, he is helping bring the mining industry into the technological era. In a move that shocked the secretive world of mining, Goldcorp had revealed 50 years worth of data -- everything it had -- on Red Lake, a productive mine in the 1950s that by 2000 many considered depleted. Archibald's consulting firm, then called Fractal Graphics and now Geoinformatics Exploration Inc., used sophisticated software to create 3-D electronic models of underground rock formations, pinpointing five sites where they thought Goldcorp would find new veins of gold. The winner's take was peanuts -- just US$105,000 -- but for Archibald the real prize would be exposure. Almost needless to say, he won the contest. In the 2 1/2 years after the competition, as Goldcorp drilled and tested and eventually confirmed Geoinformatics' predictions, its share price more than quadrupled in value. Red Lake has emerged as the world's most lucrative gold mine -- and it turned out to be a motherlode for Archibald, too. Mining is among the world's oldest industries -- and one of the last to enter the electronics age.