This week brings the final EarthByte seminar of the year, featuring Nicole Januszczak of BHP, titled “Exploration at BHP: Putting mineral systems into action.” The seminar will be held in the Madsen Building Room 331 at 11am-12pm this Wednesday 14th December, and will also streamed live via Zoom (link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/82037433636). For more information on the seminar, see below:
Exploration at BHP: Putting mineral systems into action
In the future, most significant discoveries will be under cover in technically challenging environments that render them blind to our current exploration toolkit for predicting and detecting ore deposits. To address this, we will rely increasingly on insights from predictive modelling and machine learning. An integral part of this approach will be to identify and test datasets we do not routinely use, and to apply datasets in new and innovative ways. Picking the right ground to explore is key to successful exploration. Considerable value lies in front-end loading predictive modelling at global and regional scales to ensure that we are exploring for world-class in the best mineral belts in the world and not exploring for the best deposit in a mediocre belt. A mineral systems approach to exploration is predicated on an understanding of the critical processes that need to align in space and time for an ore deposit to form providing critical grounding for predictive models. The opportunity in this space is truly extraordinary. Mineral systems operate across all scales, spatially and temporally, enabling an adaptation from two dimensional prospectivity maps that focus largely on the shallow parts of a mineral system to holistic predictive models which are based on a comprehensive understanding of mineral systems in four dimensions, deep into the Earth system and back in time.
