This site exists because the ground under Saskatchewan is among the best documented on earth, and I still could not get a straight answer about what any of it actually proved.
I work in earth science and applied geodetics — I co-founded an engineering firm, Shoring Labs — and the questions that interest me here are the ones my own field is quietest about. A core run is a physical fact. A grade is an inference drawn across all the rock nobody sampled. A reserve is a claim about money wearing geology’s clothes. Every one of those steps is defensible on its own. The distance between the first and the last is where most of the trouble lives.
So the writing keeps the qualifications attached. Where a number depends on a method, the method is named. Where a conclusion outruns its evidence, that gap is the subject rather than an embarrassment to be smoothed over.
The consequences are the other half of it. Potash, uranium, water, closure: a decision taken underground keeps travelling through licences, watersheds, balance sheets and towns for decades after everyone who made it has moved on.
I write fiction set in this province too, including a novel that shares its name with this site. The essays and the novels want the same thing from a reader — a willingness to ask who knew, when they knew, and what they filed.