This is a nice
bit of innovation and will certainly be seriously useful in developing a high resolution
map of the ground. However it is still
up to boots on the ground. You still
need to get down there and walk about to develop ground truth. What is important though is to build
excellent maps as cheaply as possible.
We all have ample maps of completely worthless ground. Most folks have no idea but square miles are
mapped just to zero in on a hint at best.
I am sure that
this will expand pretty quickly to replace a lot of expensive helicopter rides.
All good to see
so quickly in civilian hands though.
Drones
help Yukon prospectors find new gold deposits
A gold prospector from Yukon is using unmanned aerial drones and other
technologies to survey huge stretches of land for mineral deposits, and leaving
less of an environmental footprint in the process.
Shawn Ryan says
the technology is greatly reducing the cost of doing business in the initial
stages of mineral exploration.
The drones he uses
look a bit like a medium-sized kite, and carry a relatively simple 16-megapixel
camera on board. It flies over a target area, snapping photos of the ground.
He and his team also
do geophysical surveys of the area — they string out a 420-metre cable over an
area that soil sampling has already indicated may have potential. The cable has
electrodes spaced out every five metres that send electrical currents about 90
metres down into the ground and can show faults or cracks that may contain
gold.
Then they take a
geoprobe of the area. It's about the size of a riding mower with rubber tracks
on it to minimize environmental damage. At predetermined points, the probe
pushes a hollow tube into the ground until it reaches bedrock where it takes
samples, including a laser beam than detects mineralization.
The whole process
replaces the far more labour intensive trenching that was done until last year.
Then all the information from the drone, the electrodes and the probe is put
into a computer to create a 3D map with a lot of information about the area
that will be used to better pinpoint the drilling that will follow.
Work that took a
year and a half to get done can now take only two to three weeks to do. That's
making it easier for junior miners to better pinpoint where they should
concentrate their drilling programs, and leaving a smaller environmental
footprint along the way.
"The way the
whole market is working is they're running out of money and everybody's even
edgier now to actually put money into our business," Ryan says.
"What this is
going to allow us to do is process a lot of targets really quick."
Ryan says it's
reduced the cost of initial exploration to about one fifth of what it was
before. And the drones are always improving — his innovations this summer
include drones that allow for better mapping and a machine that lets crews take
samples in the field much faster.
His coworker Isaac
Fage says the technology has huge potential. "[We're] bringing new surveys
online to the industry and bringing them to the industry in a way that the
companies have confidence that these tools are effective and basically adding
value to the property," he says.
Lee Pigage, the
head of the Yukon Geological Survey says the government is also interested in
what Ryan is doing. "I think it's got great potential," Pigage says.
"Every exploration company, every exploration geologist, every prospector
wants to have a toolbox, a set of different types of tools that they can do
things with."
The territorial
government is paying Ryan's crew to do seven or eight case studies on existing
properties, to see what they can come up with. They're using these methods at
some prominent other mining properties in the territory that include Alexco's
silver mines in the Keno City area where they can test the results against
surveys that have already been done.
The results of
those case studies will be released at the Prospectors and Developers
Association of Canada conference in Toronto in March, which is one of the
world's largest mining conventions.
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