Smart Mineral Exploration: Subsurface Intelligence

Making discoveries is more complex and capital intensive than ever before. Exploration companies are confronted with countless financial, technical and operational challenges, with demands to deliver results quickly, with less risk and cost, and environmental impact.

Early exploration activities determine if there are minerals underground in a target area, without knowing with certainty what lies in the subsurface. A traditional approach is to extract and analyze dozen, hundreds or even thousands of drill holes, often exhausting available exploration budgets. Even with interpolation between these geological samples, it is still not possible to know, with certainty, what may lie in the subsurface.

With industry margins squeezed on all fronts, geological uncertainty impedes growth, drives costs, and slows time to market. Subsurface intelligence closes the knowledge gap by adding smart 3D geology models. 

See What's Really Beneath Your Feet

Vancouver-based Auracle Geospatial, a remote sensing company, uses SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite data to image deep beneath the Earth’s surface. MUD® SAR, (Mapped Underworld Dimension) is subsurface intelligence for Mineral Exploration. It is a deep-penetrating subsurface satellite technology with an advanced suite of analytics that characterize and map apparent and non-apparent geological features, including faults, fractures, lineaments and shear zones. It penetrates thick vegetation, ground cover, water, ice, snow, soils and overburden, to depths of 100 meters (300 ft.) 

MUD® SAR is a break-through subsurface exploration tool that delivers the highest available resolution (0.2meters) maps and models that enable sustainable, cost-effective detection and mapping of mineral targets in complex scenarios: year-round, day or night, extreme weather, underwater, and in remote and inaccessible locations.  It provides insights about potential deposits that are hidden deep beneath the Earth’s surface.

MUD® SAR subsurface intellitence for mineral exploration allows explorers to define subsurface structural controls and targets in places and to depths previously unseen.  Companies drill less but discover more with well-defined 3D deep subsurface and underwater views of potential target zones. Known deposits can be extended, making smaller or lower-grade deposits profitable.

Case Study: Tassawini Guyana Gold Project

Alerio Gold and Auracle Geospatial, two Canadian companies, joined forces to use MUD® SAR for Exploration to produce new geographic and geological information to refine and prioritize targets for Alerio’s future exploration programs at their Tassawini Gold Project.

The Tassawini Gold Project, located in Guyana, South America, is an advanced-stage gold project totalling 3,413 acres (1,381 ha) of heavily vegetated tropical rainforest. It hosts a historical resource and has 47, 509 meters of drilling in 1,279 core and reverse circulation drill holes. 

Auracle used the MUD® SAR technology to penetrate water, thick rainforest vegetation, and overburden (unconsolidated soils, sands, sediments) to analyze for surficial and bedrock geological information at, near or subsurface within the area of interest. Four new targets were defined. The known extent of the Tassawini gold deposit (outlined in white) occurs in the middle of a north to south trending portion of the anomaly, that is approximately three kilometers in length and 500 meters in width. There were 2 extensions (outlined in blue) of the Tassawini resource and 2 new targets, labeled as 1A and 1B, were detected. 

Add to the Understanding of Structural Trends in the Subsurface Geology

The primary objective of this collaborative work was to add to the understanding of fracture networks, rock competency and to map apparent and non-apparent geological structures including faults, fractures, lineaments and shear zones.

The 3D MUD® SAR Fracture Density Model, provided the density, orientation and length of subsurface linear features throughout the entire Area of Interest. It detected and measured the spatial density of fractures and features, per square meter. Fracture density within the newly identified target zones had high-fracture density similar to that in the Tassawini Deposit. The Fracture Density Model, a one-of-a-kind model produced only with MUD® SAR satellite data, defined deep subsurface trends that could have a causal relationship to near-surface geological structures and networks.

Violet = High Density Red = Low Density

Leverage Subsurface Technology to Drill Smarter

With well-defined 3D subsurface views of potential target zones, the overall amount of drilling needed to map, delineate and understand how structure controls shape the mineral deposit is greatly reduced. Drilling activity can focus on validating targets rather than discovering new ones. With clearly defined subsurface views of the 3D geometry, size and location of geological structures and deposits, exploration companies can achieve more with less drilling, saving time and money. 

MUD® SAR creates value with new, user-friendly 3D maps and models that transform dissimilar drill, geological, geophysics and geochemistry data, into one actionable data set. 

Take advantage of MUD® SAR subsurface intelligence to drill less and fill knowledge gaps about subsurface geological structural controls that shape mineral deposits. 

If you’re interested in any of Auracle’s products or services, please email us at:

info@auracleremotesensing.com