November 23, 2011
Session 3
10:00 a.m.
|
Mineral exploration problems and real solutions: CONSOREM’s contributions to applied research
Stéphane Faure, Réal Daigneault, Benoit Lafrance, Silvain Rafini and Sylvain Trépanier (CONSOREM)
|
The discovery of a deposit is first and foremost the result of a series of ideas and actions led by players in the exploration industry, from the initial selection of regional fertile environments right through to the drilling stage. Science still does not provide an exact blueprint for discovering deposits, but it does indirectly contribute to most steps in the exploration process. As part of this chain of research and innovation, Consortium de recherche en exploration minérale (CONSOREM) occupies a specialized and unique niche between university research and companies. The main objective of its mandate is to develop new exploration models and transfer knowledge to the industry. Three examples of research projects are presented to illustrate the role of CONSOREM.
- A region’s fertility for diamond exploration is primarily determined by whether or not the necessary conditions for preserving diamonds were present in the mantle lithosphere after the mineral formed. The morphology of such fertile cratonic roots had not been clearly recognized in North America until our study determined, by seismic tomography, domains of potential diamond preservation around craton roots, between 160 and 200 km deep. Projected to the surface, this fertile zone confirms the diamond potential for some areas and opens up other new regions for exploration.
- Mineralized zones are generally accompanied by alteration haloes, and it is a nontrivial task to distinguish the least altered samples in these haloes from the most highly altered samples proximal to mineralization. The difficulty lies in recognizing indicators of least alteration for an area, and these must often be qualitatively assessed using thin sections from a small number of samples. To remedy this problem, CONSOREM developed a new mass balance method using precursor modelling that can be applied when processing large amounts of data, for example at the scale of a mining camp. The new method was delivered to the industry as the original Lithomodeleur software, which integrated a wide variety of analytical tools for processing lithogeochemical data.
- Polymetallic iron-oxide (IOCG) deposits are attractive for their gold, copper and uranium contents as well as for their enormous volumes (Gt), even though they have particularly complex exploration models. CONSOREM has proposed a new approach based on the geochemical characterization of plutons genetically associated with IOCG deposits sensu stricto. The method has revealed similarities with Cu-Au alkali-calcic porphyries and can be used to identify favourable areas in the Abitibi.
|
