It’s been 3 weeks since the 94th PDAC convention concluded in Toronto. We’ve been reflecting on the technical insights and connections made throughout the conference.
Momentum in the western Tethyan Belt remains significant. We heard about exploration and development plans for high sulphidation epithermal, porphyry copper and carbonate replacement deposits in several countries, including Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and Serbia. Notable benchmarks include plans for approximately 150,000m of drilling by Eldorado and Dundee Precious Metals’ rapid advancement of the Coka Rakita discovery toward a 2029 production goal with exciting ongoing exploration plans in that district. In strategic partnership with BHP, Mundoro continue systematic work within the Timok Magmatic Complex. A key takeaway for regional targeting was the discussion on Bulgaria’s National Geofund and the transition toward open-source historical data to improve belt-wide accessibility.
Technical sessions on the Americas provided an overview of the epithermal and porphyry systems and current exploration strategies. Gold Fields outlined some methods required for overcoming the challenges of vectoring through steam-heated alteration at Salares Norte, with discrete expressions of Au in surface samples. A reminder that subtle geochemical surface expressions and leveraging of pathfinder elements remain key to exploring the Andean terrane.
We were delighted to give a short workshop on using the more advanced features of ioGAS alongside James Cleverly at the IMDEX booth. We discussed the uses of UMAP, K-means clustering and the Workflow tool applied to mapping litho-geochemical domains in a porphyry data set. The resulting workflow was saved, rendering it transferrable to all other team members running ioGAS.
It is great to see the industry leaning into open-source historical data and increasing realisation of the importance of orebody knowledge in developing frameworks to explore for ore deposits.
If you’d like any more information on any of our services, or assistance with enhancing the impact of your geochemical data, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
