Richard Blewett in a LinkedIn post wrote of this magnetic image of Australia …..
Australia is blessed with a remarkable geophysical coverage of high-quality free pre-competitive data …..
For a small explorer, or geological survey, without access to inhouse deep-domain specialists who can write these specs for your own surveys then here is the #recipebook for you.
For me, a geological researcher, this is very true. Having this wonderful data enables me to have hours of fun researching and helping our explorationists find mines!
In comment to Richard’s blog I stated that…
….good structural geology could be got from this image,
and to Morrie Goodz I commented …..
….. Iām going to structurally geologise Australia with the big gravity image above. Then Iām going to use the image to selectively geologise the Yilgarn in detail and then the Norseman area in more detail. No one else can do that at the moment. That is the big plus for EagleEye over other systems, especially for greenfield exploration…..
Well let’s see if I can deliver on my claim and get the geology of the small area of Norseman from the excellent, but fuzzy colour image below.
The latest magnetic image of Australia. Broad structural regions can be seen but these colour contour plans do not show sharp featured structural geology. The EagleEye system uses Microsoft pattern recognition software to get the underlying structures and texture, sharpness, brightness, contrast and other functions can reveal the underlying structural geology.
This EagleEye enhanced image shows many structures. We will be gradually refining these structures to see if they represent real features.
This EagleEye enhanced image shows structures in the Yilgarn and Pilbara cratons. The major dark features in the Yilgarn correlate with the terrain boundaries. I plotted the main mines onto these plans to see if they line up with structures and to check if these structures correlate with known structures. They do correlate with structures but need to enlarge the scale to get better detail and check their validity. So we’ll next look at just the Yilgarn Craton.
This is the EagleEye enhanced image of the Yilgarn craton with main mines overlain. The large NNE blue trend up from JULIMAR in the west has many mines along it. This is being actively explored. The fact that these trends now show up very clearly is of great importance for exploration targeting. Where the ENE trends intersect the NNE trend is where the existing mines occur and are thus prime exploration targets. The trouble is that these structures are not currently able to be visualised from the base magnetics or other plans. I have learned how to achieve this and can selectively tune EagleEye to display early ductile (above figure) through to late brittle structures in the figure below – very useful??
Exploration targeting.
Yilgarn gold mines, in particular, are related to the very last Archaean brittle structures. The gold mineralisation generally postdates the felsic intrusive rocks which in many mines have a NNE, NNW and ENE trend.
The image was enhanced to show these brittle structures. There is good correlation between these structures and the mines. The intersection of these structures are prime exploration targets. I’ll leave it to the more intrepid explorers to outline these junctions and go peg any vacant ground!
We will next look at the Eastern Yilgarn from Leonora to Norseman to further refine our structural research.
Cheers and successful exploring!
Bob