Abstract
Mineral exploration is increasingly challenging in inhabited areas. To evaluate the potential of soil analysis by pXRF (portable X-ray fluorescence) as a low-footprint exploration technique, we revisited a historic Sb district in an agricultural area and performed shallow-soil sampling (Ah and B horizons) along profiles across known veins to capture the endogenic geochemical anomaly signals. Despite an expected bias between pXRF measurements and laboratory analyses, the former effectively located the Sb veins, especially when using their multi-element capabilities. Composition data processing (CoDa) and horizon-selective sampling significantly improved the method’s efficiency. On-site measurements allow dynamic sampling and mapping, helping with faster, cost-effective sample selection for further laboratory investigations. Based on this case study, where similar geochemical patterns were obtained for both horizons, application of an on-site approach to a humic horizon can increase survey efficiency and decrease impacts.
Highlights
The competitiveness of mineral exploration is based on reducing costs and capital intensity, improving dynamics and shortening delays between target testing and feasibility analysis.The exploration industry faces several constraints depending on the geographical location of projects, often developed far from infrastructure and analytical laboratories
Quality assurance (QA)/quality control (QC) methods are fully applicable to Portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) [27]
Data analysis is conducted here with the pXRF results alone, in order to simulate what exploration geologists would do without laboratory results, the latter being used only for later quality assessment
Summary
The competitiveness of mineral exploration is based on reducing costs and capital intensity, improving dynamics and shortening delays between target testing and feasibility analysis.The exploration industry faces several constraints depending on the geographical location of projects, often developed far from infrastructure and analytical laboratories. The competitiveness of mineral exploration is based on reducing costs and capital intensity, improving dynamics and shortening delays between target testing and feasibility analysis. While drill-core geochemistry for resource and reserve estimates for feasibility studies still requires traditional laboratory analysis as an essential step in regional exploration, commodity detection, target investigation and ranking can become significantly cheaper and quicker with the use of field analysers. This is because the goal is not the absolute accuracy of the measurements, but rather the relative ranking of the element concentrations and their anomaly to background contrast. Portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) technology allows dynamic decision-making and agile exploration management and facilitates cost-effective exploration [1]
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