SpaDiS™ Software Gives Geologists and Miners an Edge in Explorations

Customer Challenge

The Vearncombe consulting group needed a software package that allowed them to effectively find and extract profit yielding mineral deposits.

Solution Achieved

In the past, prospectors of valuable minerals like gold and silver relied on extensive fieldwork, photography, and personal experience when planning and implementing mining expeditions. Ground explorations to search for and extract minerals were a costly gamble. Companies often committed a great deal of time, people, and money, with no way of knowing that a chosen area would provide a significant return on investment.

To reduce risk and increase profitability, modern mining organizations use complex data from a variety of sources to pinpoint land areas that are rich in valuable minerals – before they put resources on the ground. SpaDiS™ Spatial Analysis Software provides the technology they need to easily analyze their diverse data, make informed operational decisions based on sophisticated analyses, and ultimately increase their profitability.

SpaDiS was developed by Vearncombe & Associates of Perth, Australia. Vearncombe provides a variety of services to the mining and exploration industry, including professional consultation and software solutions. Vearncombe physicists used IDL® to develop the SpaDiS package to provide their clients with a way to intuitively visualize and understand regional endowments of mineral deposits, pinpoint controls on, and varying orientations of mineralization at all scales, allowing them to more effectively find and extract profit yielding mineral deposits.

In 2006, Vearncombe contracted with the NV5 (formerly ITT Visual Information Solutions) Custom Solutions team to upgrade SpaDiS. NV5 updated the application’s legacy IDL code, added key visualization capabilities, and incorporated important features that enabled SpaDiS as a stand-alone commercial application, including a software installer and special licensing.

SpaDiS includes a user-friendly GUI and streamlined methods for quickly importing and comparing data from many sources. The software’s interactive display makes it easy to view data in 2D or 3D, subset data, show relationships between datasets, identify pull-out points, visualize patterns and trends, visualize grade variances, ore envelopes and high grade trends within envelopes, grade-tonnage distributions, and much more. The software incorporates proven mathematical algorithms developed by geologists specifically for mineral resources, and performs complex analyses based on spatial distribution of data, such as assay data.

“It has proven to be an invaluable part of the process of predicting kimberlite trends and occurrences. Much of what is done at the initial stages of exploration is highly subjective,” said Keith Jones, a highly respected diamond exploration geophysicist. “SpaDiS provides a means of introducing a more independent objective analysis of point data.”

With a better understanding of exploration targets and the ability to validate assessments made from other geological perspectives, including geostatistics and exploration drilling, geologists and commercial mining companies can effectively plan and execute mining operations. Important advances in understanding mineral deposits and their relationships, as well as the successful targeting of gold, base metal, and diamond deposits, have been credited to SpaDiS technology. To learn more about SpaDiS or Vearncombe consulting services, visit www.vearncombe.com. 

Benefits

• The NV5 Custom Solutions Group was able to update and commercialize the SpaDiS package quickly.
• The NV5 Custom Solutions Group helped Vearncombe to identify requirements, and then included them in the software.
• Vearncombe can now provide customers with an advanced method for detecting mineral deposits.