With an increasing shortage of skilled geologists and the urge to get a better return on huge drilling investments interest is growing in automated methods to recover more objective information from drill cores and drill chips in exploration and mining.
CSIRO’s suite of HyLogging™ technologies is offering new insights into alteration and host-rock mineralogy of cores and helping geologists get their jobs done more efficiently while bringing to light new relationships regarding mineralising processes and vectors to ore. Improved understanding of the link between mineralogy and rock mass characteristics and mineral processing properties is also being explored.
HyLogging Systems are robotic infrared reflectance spectrometers and core imagers that can scan cores from between 150 to 700 metres per day or up to 3000 chip samples per day. From the hyperspectral data stream mineralogy and other indices of physical properties are extracted and along with high resolution images of the cores and chips a permanent digital record is achieved. Core logging, a notoriously subjective and sometimes unrewarding task, is set to become more objective and repeatable, and by using digital and Internet tools the results can now be shared with a far great number of people both within organisations and across the whole geoscience community. This will further open-up the opportunities to search for the mineralogical signatures of ore environments
The talk will cover the state of play of adoption of these new technologies around Australia with examples from several different deposits. It will also demonstrate the developing Auscope National Virtual Core Library whereby the huge legacy of cores in State and Territory Geological Surveys will be scanned and the results put on-line for global interrogation.