End-to-End Mineral Exploration with Artificial Intelligence and Ambient Noise Tomography

This paper presents an innovative end-to-end workflow for mineral exploration, integrating ambient noise tomography (ANT) and artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the discovery and delineation of mineral resources essential for the global transition to a low carbon economy. We focus on copper as a critical element, required in significant quantities for renewable energy solutions. We show the benefits of utilising ANT, characterised by its speed, scalability, depth penetration, resolution, and low environmental impact, alongside artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to refine a continent-scale prospectivity model at the deposit scale by fine-tuning our model on local high-resolution data. We show the promise of the method by first presenting a new data-driven AI prospectivity model for copper within Australia, which serves as our foundation model for further fine-tuning. We then focus on the Hillside IOCG deposit on the prospective Yorke Peninsula. We show that with relatively few local training samples (orebody intercepts), we can fine tune the foundation model to provide a good estimate of the Hillside orebody outline. Our methodology demonstrates how AI can augment geophysical data interpretation, providing a novel approach to mineral exploration with improved decision-making capabilities for targeting mineralization, thereby addressing the urgent need for increased mineral resource discovery.