TAS tech talk - How the Canadian Metal Earth project strives to improve our knowledge of mineralization: an overview of multidisciplinary geophysical methods.

Just before he leaves us for the second time, Dr Esmaeil Eshaghi will tell us of How the Canadian Metal Earth project strives to improve our knowledge of mineralization: an overview of multidisciplinary geophysical methods.  Esi’s insider perspective of this huge effort getting underway to improve Canadian discovery rates will be at 1300 on Tuesday 25 February in the CODES conference room (UTas Sandy Bay).  An abstract is attached.  Members are invited to join the speaker and president for lunch at the Uni Staff Club afterwards.  Please RSVP to me or Matt Cracknell (tassecretary@aseg.org.au) if you’d like to come.

As many of you will well remember, Esi was in the airborne geophysics group at the Geological Survey of Iran before completing his PhD in regional potential field modelling at UTas a few years ago and proceeding to a postdoc stint at Laurentian University in Sudbury.  Currently he is with Thomson Aviation as a geophysicist.

Abstract:

How the Canadian Metal Earth project strives to improve our knowledge of mineralization:
an overview of multidisciplinary geophysical methods

Since 2005, there was a marked increase of costs to explore new economical mineral occurrences,
while the success of discovery of new deposits has diminished. Metal Earth, led by the Mineral
Exploration Research Centre at the Harquail School of Earth Sciences, Laurentian University,
Canada, is a seven-year $104 million applied research project with the main goal of improving the
understanding of mineral endowment in Precambrian greenstone belts. An essential part of this
project is to use geological observations and geophysical data to define crust to mantle scale
differences between transects that cross metal endowed and lesser endowed Archean greenstone
belts to define key mechanisms responsible for the genesis of base and precious metal deposits.
For this purpose, high resolution datasets are acquired and combined with existing data to create a
multidisciplinary database containing different geological and geophysical information (e.g.
geological observations, targeted mapping, seismic, gravity, magnetic survey, electromagnetic,
and petrophysics).
In this talk, I preview multidisciplinary geophysical data acquisition, processing and initial models
across different transects, both minerally enriched and less endowed, and provide an overview of
findings so far. It includes a brief discussion of seismic, magnetotelluric and potential field data
(i.e. gravity and magnetic) data and models along some transects as well as petrophysical
characterisations within Abitibi Greenstone Belt. The initial models indicate some distinct
differences between minerally prospective and less-prospective areas at depth. The findings are
promising in terms of identifying new components contributing to mineral deposition.