The focus of this blog is to highlight some applied structural geological issues that impact the mineral exploration and mining industry.
Our investigation of hundreds of mineral deposits shows that structural geometry represents the fundamental control on the flow of mineralising fluids and the deposition of mineralisation. However, this contrasts with the lack of recognition and/or documentation of structural geological features by exploration and mining personnel. It is common to find that first-order geometry of a deposit is not usually understood from a structural geological perspective, and because of this the main structural control of the deposit is not clearly known.
Also, a critical component that is commonly overlooked in many deposits, especially during the crucially important early stages of initial resource evaluation, is a solid geological history that integrates the deposit paragenesis with the structural history. Too often, drilling programs are poorly conceived due to a lack of careful documentation. Orefind addresses this problem by integrating structural geological and paragenetic data with the other critical dimension of a 3D geological model that incorporates all datasets.
Our focus in this blog will be to explain and illustrate, through examples, the benefits of applied structural geology for mineral exploration and mining, as we feel that structural geology is underapprecaited in the resources industry.
We hope to also make this blog a way to connect with geologists and executive geologists in the resource industry. If you have any questions about structural geological interpretation, implicit modelling, or any other issues raised in the blog, please email us at
info@orefind.com.
Our next post: Brett Davis reports on the
Structural Geology and Resources 2012 Symposium
Jun Cowan
Director, Orefind
jun.cowan@orefind.com
Next post:
Structural Geology and Resources 2012 Symposium
Disclaimer: The views expressed in the Orefind blog posts do not represent the views of any hardware or software manufacturers, or their staff. The opinions and recommendations expressed are completely independent, and are based on the practical experience of Orefind staff. Orefind does not have any referral or financial arrangements with companies that are mentioned in our blog posts.