HyLogging and the developing
National Virtual Core Library
Jon
Huntington - CSIRO Exploration and Mining - HyLogging System Group
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