Samso Insight Episode 98: The Discovery of Olympic Dam concluded one of the longest search for a commodity.   In 1957, Western Mining Corporation Limited (ASX: WMC) initiated a search for Copper which started a sequence of events that lead to the discovery of the largest known mineral deposit in 1976. It would take the company another two years before they understood the magnitude of their discovery.   Olympic Dam was the third discovery by WMC in 10 years. The significance of the discovery is that it would be another twenty years before the next big deposit , Prominent Hill was to be discovered.   WMC was created in 1933 and was taken over by BHP in 2002. In 2009, Olympic Dam had a resource of 9.1BT of resource and it was 4.4 times bigger than the initial resource that WMC had announced. It was worth USD863B. In 2017, it was reported that there was 120MT of Cu eq (equivalent) and it will take 500 years to deplete the resource at that time.   The Story of the Olympic Dam was documented by the book "The Olympic Dam Story" by David Upton. I was able to find David and had organised to meet David and get his view of the discovery and his book on this episode of Samso Insights.   I hope this episode had brought out the essence of the hard work and perseverance of the WMC group to search and discover a once in a life time deposit such as Olympic Dam. I am a big believer of mineral exploration. My thoughts are that the low hanging fruits of mineral discovery was a couple of decades ago.   The giants to be found are all undercover or in areas that have been misunderstood or neglected such as Tropicana, Nova-Bollinger, Winu, Havieron, Julimar, and Fosterville, just to name a few.     Chapters:   00:00 Start   00:20 Introduction   01:36 How it started   09:21 The journey to look for copper   12:55 Communicating with shareholders   15:57 The work culture in Western Mining   19:35 The search for Mineral Systems   24:05 Discussion of new technologies and ideas   27:42 The need of interpretation of data   30:14 The complexity of the Olympic Dam   32:52 Political issues of Uranium   35:06 What drives the exploration?   37:37 The drilling   39:07 What is David Upton up to these days?   41:04 The vast amount information available   42:46 Why read the The Olympic Story   45:51 Summary of the Olympic Dam Story   49:35 Conclusion