Wavelet Tessellation and its Application to Downhole Gamma Data from the Manyingee & Bigrlyi Sandstone-Hosted Uranium Deposits
A. Wilde1, E.J. Hill2, S. Schmid2 & W.R. Taylor3
1 Centre for Exploration Targeting, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia
2 CSIRO, Mineral Resources, Kensington, Western Australia
3 Energy Metals Ltd, West Perth, Western Australia
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Abstract
Measurement of natural gamma radiation in drillholes can be important for lithology identification, correlation of sedimentary layers between drillholes, in studies of hydrothermal alteration and in geometallurgy inter alia. Traditional interpretation of gamma data for these purposes has typically been by subjective visual analysis. In this paper we discuss the application of a new technique: wavelet tessellation (Hill et al. 2015). Tessellation automatically picks boundaries in depth-attributed numeric data and attributes the area between the boundaries with an average of the data, in this case gamma radiation in counts per second. We show that tessellation of gamma data is a valuable adjunct to traditional visual lithological logging using examples from the Manyingee and Bigrlyi uranium deposits. Tessellation can rapidly and reproducibly resolve important detail in the rocks that is not detectable by the human eye and should be considered an important addition to the toolkit of the mining and exploration geoscientist.
AIG Notebook: N2017-001