Abstract
The mineral exploration industry requires new methods and tools to address the challenges of declining mineral reserves and increasing discovery costs. Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) represents an emerging geochemical tool for mineral exploration that can provide rapid, in situ, compositional analysis and high-resolution imaging in both laboratory and field and settings. We demonstrate through a review of previously published research and our new results how LIBS can be applied to qualitative element detection for geochemical fingerprinting, sample classification, and discrimination, as well as quantitative geochemical analysis, rock characterization by grain size analysis, and in situ geochemical imaging. LIBS can detect elements with low atomic number (i.e., light elements), some of which are important pathfinder elements for mineral exploration and/or are classified as critical commodities for emerging green technologies. LIBS data can be acquired in situ, facilitating the interpretation of geochemical data in a mineralogical context, which is important for unraveling the complex geological history of most ore systems. LIBS technology is available as a handheld analyzer, thus providing a field capability to acquire low-cost geochemical analyses in real time. As a consequence, LIBS has wide potential to be utilized in mineral exploration, prospect evaluation, and deposit exploitation quality control. LIBS is ideally suited for field exploration programs that would benefit from rapid chemical analysis under ambient environmental conditions.
Highlights
Mineral exploration plays an important role in society, as the continued discovery of new deposits is required to supply mineral and other natural resources for the more equitable and low-carbon economy of the future [1,2,3,4]
Geological materials have an extremely wide range of composition, grain size, texture, and surface roughness. These features can be highly variable in the spatial scale and, affect the Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) analysis
Whilst the test dataset used in this study is small, the results show that Cu-sulfide grain size proxies developed from LIBS data can be used to adequately assess grain size
Summary
Mineral exploration plays an important role in society, as the continued discovery of new deposits is required to supply mineral and other natural resources for the more equitable and low-carbon economy of the future [1,2,3,4]. The global trends of declining mineral reserves for many commodities and increasing discovery costs [3,4,10] suggest that exploration investment is insufficient and/or is not being deployed in the most effective manner possible Both trends are occurring at a time when new mineral deposit discoveries tend to be deeper, covered, and/or more remote, which are unlike near-surface mines that were often found, at least initially, by prospectors [4,7,8,9,11]. Spot microanalyses often exclude, or ignore, grain boundaries, fractures, and/or complex mineral intergrowths These features are, important micro-textural sites for transporting and/or depositing ore-forming elements at the microscale. To address these analytical challenges, there is a growing interest in two-dimensional (2D) element mapping, which provides geochemical information in a complete geologic context with all of the adjoining mineral phases. With careful calibration using standards of known composition, these geochemical images can provide fully quantitative results for the targeted area of interest [109,110]
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