ASEG WA Tech Night Talk by Steve Kuhn, FMG on Predicting Intrusion locations in porphyry terrains from a fusion of Geophysical and Geochemical data

ASEG WA - April Tech Night event
Date & Venue:
Thursday 28th April 2022
5:30pm drinks, talk start 6.00pm
The Celtic Club
48 Ord St,
West Perth WA

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/aseg-wa-branch-event-april-2022-tech-night-tickets-315266048237

The WA Branch of the Australian Society of Exploration Geophysicists invites you to attend our upcoming ASEG WA Branch Tech night event at Celtic Club, West Perth. Networking drinks will take place before the talk, with snacks and drinks provided. Free street parking is available in West Perth after 5pm. It is a condition of entry to the venue that you must provide proof of COVID vaccination and face-masks must be worn at all times except eating/drinking.

but still with the usual snacks and drinks provided. Note that there is plenty of public transportation, and, if need be, free parking is available. The venue has wheelchair accessibility. The details of the speech title and the author's bio are provided below.

Speech title: Predicting Intrusion locations in porphyry terrains from a fusion of Geophysical and Geochemical data
Speaker: Steve Kuhn, Senior Geoscientist with Fortescue Metals Group

Talk summary: 

There are many ways to target a porphyry system: For example, the Phyllic and inner propylitic halo is chargeable… if shallow enough to pass current and where widely disseminated and not restricted to veins. They’re magnetic highs, lows, remnant, non-magnetic, neither, or masked by a mass of variably magnetic andesite. Source intrusions can produce a gravity low, if not obscured by cover depth and density, weathering intensity and lack of contrast with background rocks. Near-surface, porphyries or their associated epithermal expressions can be amenable to radiometric or spectral methods, and a range of geochemical sampling or mapping strategies, which come with their own complications when such a system is complicated by weathering, topography and signal mixing with the surrounding volcanic pile and country rock. In other words, simple rules don’t hold.
The usual approach (and the right one!) is to explore all avenues, with multiple datasets supporting the presence of a mineralised system. In this talk, an approach is offered to augment the conventional workflow, focussing on one aspect of the problem: Identifying and locating source intrusions. Using a machine learning algorithm, selected specifically for the ability to deal with highly variable, non-linear geophysical and geochemical signatures. The benefit of this method isn’t speed or accuracy, rather it offers a quantitative robustness to the whole process and the ability to assess every step of the process: what data did we really need, how confident can we really be that intrusion is really at location x and what was the probability of an intrusion at location y where another rock type was ultimately predicted?
 

Speaker Bio:
Steve started as an exploration geologist at the St Ives gold mine in 2007: looking after over 25,000m of drilling as part of the team that took the 1Moz Athena and Hamlet deposits from discovery to first resource, while living in Kalgoorlie for 2 years. From 2010 to 2013 Steve worked as an exploration geophysicist with Gold Fields Growth and International Projects. After a few years back at school, Steve joined Fortescue Metals Group in early 2018 as a Senior Geophysicist.
Steve has worked on a wide array of porphyry, epithermal, orogenic, and Sed-hosted Cu projects from major mining provinces including Far Southeast (Philippines), Taldy Bulak (Kyrgyzstan), Cerro Chucapacca (Peru), Solaris Norte (Chile), Damang (Ghana), Woodjam (British Columbia), Athena, Hamlet and Invincible (St Ives camp WA) and Sentinel/Enterprise (Zambia) in addition to numerous early-stage projects.
Steve has a B.Sc. (Hons), Grad Cert and Ph.D. from CODES, has clocked over a thousand days in the field and has a soft spot for potential field and IP acquisition and modelling, conventional and machine assisted mineral exploration and targeting; defining the uncertainties/redundancies in geoscience data and modelling; and generally pulling things apart to learn how they work. Steve is currently a Senior Geoscientist with Fortescue Metals Group, focussed on advanced target generation in the international projects group.

REGISTRATION and RSVP are REQUIRED by the end of 25th April to give our hosts at Celtic Club enough time to properly set up their venue. ASEG WA Branch would like to give thanks to sponsors for their continuous support.

Please email wasecretary@aseg.org.au with any queries or for additional information. Kindly rsvp in the below link to get a spot as seats are limited. We are looking forward to seeing you there.