By Geena Paul
SANTIAGO (Commodity Online): An earthquake measuring 8.8 on Richter scale hit Chile on Saturday and this has hit the global gold markets also and how.

Chile is one of the biggest mining economies in the world. Chile is a leader in copper mining and it has several gold mines also. With the huge quake hitting the nation killing at least 214 people, ripping apart buildings and bridges and sending tsunamis surging across the Pacific, the nation will be fighting the disaster in the coming months and this will impact its almost all mining operations.

In fact, recently exploration drilling at the Ojo de Agua East zone of the Volcan gold project in Chile had confirmed the presence of significant mineralization.

Andina Minerals had announced that it completed five holes at the site to a combined depth of 1,730 metres to follow up on a surface trenching programme carried out in December. Intercepts from this work included a section measuring 70 metres graded at 1.2 grams per tonne (g/t) of gold, which was encountered at a depth of 176 metres. This intersection was encountered in Hole 3, which was graded at 0.52 g/t of gold over its entire 336-metre depth. In addition, this hole featured an intercept graded at 0.53 g/t of gold over the upper 84 metres.

Other intersections from the drilling included a two-metre vein interval graded at 4.0 g/t of gold and a 60-metre section graded at 0.5 g/t gold. The company was planning to carry out further exploration drilling in the area.

But this operations will be hit badly by the quake which left Chile in a very bad shape. Pictures shown on television channels told a tragic tale of a nation which was all set to become a big economy with the help of its minerals.

In Chile, officials said the 8.8-magnitude quake displaced more than 1.5 million people and severely damaged 500,000 homes. President Michelle Bachelet called the quake one of the worst tragedies in the last 50 years and declared a state of catastrophe.

The quake, tied for the world’s fifth-largest since 1900, set off tsunamis that swamped nearby islands before moving across the Pacific, prompting warnings in all 53 nations ringing the ocean. It was the first hemisphere-wide tsunami warning since 1964.

Chile is the world’s largest producer of cooper. It has the world’s most productive mine at Chuquicamanta. Northern Chile also has rich, high-grade iron-ore deposits, mainly in the Coquimbo area. Most of the ore is exported, and the rest is used by the local iron and steel industry.

Chile has the largest deposits of nitrate, in the Atacama Desert in the north. The mining and exporting of nitrate (used for fertilizers and for the production of high explosives) fluorished during the last quarter of the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth centuries.

Other minerals produced nowadays include: gold, silver, molybdenum, manganese, zinc, lead, baixite, sulfur, and potash. Uranium, cobalt, antimony, and tungsten are also mined.

Oil and natural gas fields, near the eastern outlet of the Strait of Magellan and the northern coast of Tierra del Fuego, produced 1,940,000 tons of oil and 4,358 million cubic meters of gas in 1986. In 1989 Chile's oil fields produced an average of 24,000 barrels per day. Coal production was 1.3 million tons in 1986.

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