Integrating geological and geophysical data through advanced constrained inversions

Abstract

To be reliable, Earth models used for mineral exploration should be consistent with all available geological and geophysical information. During the past several years an important focus of inversion research has been towards advancing the integration of geological data (such as lithology and structure), physical property data (measurements taken on rock samples) and geophysical survey data through appropriate inversion methodologies. We expand the types of geological information that can be incorporated into ‘minimum structure’ type deterministic inversions involving minimisation of an objective function. These include orientation information and physical property trends. We also present an iterative cooperative inversion strategy for combining multiple types of geophysical data and recovering geologically realistic models involving sharp interfaces between rock units. We provide a synthetic example to illustrate our methods.