The Geographic Information System (GIS) now is used in many fields among such as agriculture and land use, forestry and wildlife management, monitoring of desertification, archaeology, city planning, municipal applications and geology. The applications of GIS in geology are very broad and diverse, but here we'll focus in GIS application to serve mineral exploration.
The process of mineral exploration composed of several stages which starts with small scale and develops into larger scale. In every stage, geological, topographical, geophysical, geochemical data are collected, processed and integrated. Then, after finishing every stage produced mineral potential map and the study area becomes smaller.
Mineral exploration companies deal with various types of data sources to explore for minerals deposits. The types of data vary from geological maps, multispectral satellite images, and geophysical images to databases in different formats. The best platform to bring all these data together and get a precious result is GIS.
GIS also can be used to generate a mineral potential map, in the absence of comprehensive systematic mineral exploration programs, it is important to develop alternative methodologies of mineral potential classification.
Then, it's possible to use spatial data that are relevant to mineral potential such as; lithology and topography, which are available for most areas. The importance of such data can be realized by their incorporation in GIS (Bonham-Carter, 1994). Then it is important to add exploration criteria. Those criteria provided by conceptual mineral deposit models are invaluable bases for the generation of mineral potential information.
GIS can be useful in many stages of mineral exploration processes: data acquisition, storage, manipulate, and reporting. Its possible now to the geologists gain the field data electronically that by using Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers. The Internet also can be act as a source of data sets which can be downloaded directly from it. All these data types can be combined, integrated, and analyzed using GIS.
GIS can easily integrate with other specific programs for image and geophysical data processing. So, Raster images such as satellite imagery or geophysical images can be displayed in GIS and overlaid with vector data such as geology, faults, and geochemical samples.
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Right, interrested.
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