Burkina Faso is a gold-rich province whose mineral potential is mainly associated with the Birimian volcano-sedimentary belts and their intersections with Eburnean shear zones. Recently, the government of Burkina Faso completed a country-wide high-resolution airborne geophysical coverage for geological mapping and exploration of mineral resources. In this paper, we present results of automatic interpretation of large airborne geophysical dataset. We use sophisticated algorithms based on artificial intelligence for interpreting the acquired country-wide large dataset to help delineate new favourable areas for gold exploration. First, we show some interpretation results that depict the regional litho-structural framework of Burkina Faso. Next, we present results obtained using an automatic lineament analysis process to map and define the most prospective areas for gold exploration and targeting. The use of texture analysis and contrast invariant ridge detection on the airborne magnetic data helped delineate areas of structural complexity reflecting both fault intersection density and fault orientation density. The results obtained from the intelligent maps not only agree well with known mineralized zones but also suggest new areas of high prospectivity for gold mineralization.
Presentation Date: Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Session Start Time: 8:30 AM
Presentation Time: 9:20 AM
Location: 301B
Presentation Type: Oral
