Uranium, geoinformatics, and the economic image of mineral exploration

When uranium prospectors working in northern Canada want to visualize a new deposit, they can't simply walk outside and take a picture of the ground beneath their feet. 'Mapping' an ore body in the twenty-first century means building a statistical model from a grid of chemical data, a collaborative process demanding the efforts of drilling crews, geologists, chemists, and statisticians. As rock samples are translated into numerical concentration values and then back into images of geological features, scientific theories become economic data, reshaping geological theory, environmental regulation and development in the process.