It's not precisely that they collect shiny things?
It's more that -- okay, so, Traditionally, In Days Of Yore, the way people went prospecting was to take a map, and plonk a bloody great grid down over the top of it, and just mechanically sample at every grid intersection regardless of whether what was there was in fact e.g. an elephant. (I exaggerate only slightly.)
This led to some really weird patterns: a single geographically-isolated sample, f'rex, that contained in comparative terms A Fucktonne of diamonds, just sort of floating like an island in the middle of an otherwise diamond-free expanse of land.
... it was a termite mound.
It was always a termite mound.
It took them A While, however, to actually get enough data points and pay enough attention to notice this.
It turns out! That some of the reason termite mounds are great for soil aeration! Are exactly why they are also full of gold and diamonds: they dig down A LOT, and bring actually very impressive amounts of material back up from the depths with them.
... material that sometimes happens to be a seam of diamonds.
So these days quite a lot of industrial prospecting boils down to "eh, let's go poke a termite heap": sampling surface rocks is unlikely to show up any diamond seams that people didn't actually already know about, frankly, because if they were that accessible they were that accessible, but termites? Termites are GREAT. Termites do ALL THE DIGGING FOR YOU.
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It's more that -- okay, so, Traditionally, In Days Of Yore, the way people went prospecting was to take a map, and plonk a bloody great grid down over the top of it, and just mechanically sample at every grid intersection regardless of whether what was there was in fact e.g. an elephant. (I exaggerate only slightly.)
This led to some really weird patterns: a single geographically-isolated sample, f'rex, that contained in comparative terms A Fucktonne of diamonds, just sort of floating like an island in the middle of an otherwise diamond-free expanse of land.
... it was a termite mound.
It was always a termite mound.
It took them A While, however, to actually get enough data points and pay enough attention to notice this.
It turns out! That some of the reason termite mounds are great for soil aeration! Are exactly why they are also full of gold and diamonds: they dig down A LOT, and bring actually very impressive amounts of material back up from the depths with them.
... material that sometimes happens to be a seam of diamonds.
So these days quite a lot of industrial prospecting boils down to "eh, let's go poke a termite heap": sampling surface rocks is unlikely to show up any diamond seams that people didn't actually already know about, frankly, because if they were that accessible they were that accessible, but termites? Termites are GREAT. Termites do ALL THE DIGGING FOR YOU.
:D