Grant: Alliance Grants

Our project will advance Canadian knowledge, models, and processes to optimize efficiency, minimize environmental impacts, and support data-driven decisions to search deeper under the Earth's surface to determine and describe new deposits of critical minerals including nickel, copper, cobalt, and zinc with high precision. Specifically, our project will tackle the coherent integration of precise subsurface data from a variety of sources, and objective uncertainty estimates, via computationally economical statistical methods, that integrate and assess disparate data to solve the geologically constrained geophysical data inverse problem for resource targeting for critical minerals. We will develop, test, and implement novel inversion and modeling algorithms based on Bayesian statistical methods for solving Stochastic Inverse Problems that reduce reliance on non-physical regularization, unrealistically precise prior knowledge of deposit characteristics, and limiting assumptions about uncertainties. The research will be conducted by an interdisciplinary team of geophysicists and statisticians along with postdoctoral fellows at Simon Fraser University and industrial partner Ideon Technologies. Ideon Technologies is focused on helping mining companies to identify geophysical anomalies with greater resolution and clarity beneath the Earth's surface with minimal environmental impact - building, testing, and deploying subsurface intelligence solutions that will help precision-target deposits, accurately map and monitor mine operations. The academic team and Ideon have a strong established record of close and productive collaboration. The proposed research project will support Ideon's product roadmap and advance their novel subsurface intelligence ambitions.