This is the article I referred to.
Noranda embarks on
eye-in-the-sky prospecting
The company hopes that its new airborne spectrometer will give it a head start in finding minerals that traditional geologists missed
CAREY FRENCH
Special to The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, September 8, 1998
What weighs about the same as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, can leap countries, has eyes that put a hawk to shame and offers its Canadian
handlers the exclusive prospect of kicking serious you-know-what when it comes to discovering hidden treasure?
If you've been in the High Arctic this summer -- or happened to be wandering around the bush near Timmins, Ont. -- you may have seen it.
Provided, that is, you can spot a suitcase five kilometres up.
That's where Toronto-based Noranda Mining and Exploration Inc. has been flying its geologist-in-a-box, a normally earthbound piece
of technology that the exploration company figures will give it a head start in discovering valuable minerals that traditional geologists,
whacking rocks with hammers, may have missed.
The new airborne spectrometer -- currently among the most sensitive in commercial use -- is owned by Earth Search Sciences Inc. of McCall, Idaho. But Noranda, by being at the right place at the right time with a $1-million investment, has first crack at using the instrument for mineral purposes.
"Others can fly it for forestry or the environment," says John Gingerich, director of research and technological innovation, "but
we've locked out the mining community."
And that is expected to give the Canadian company a window of opportunity until new satellite-based or airborne systems become
viable. "Technology has a shelf life and competing systems are being built now . . . but we figure there's somewhere between 18 months and two years before people are fully competitive," he says.
Mounted in a hole in the floor of a Cessna 320, the system has been flown this year by Noranda in parts of Australia, Mexico and Ontario,
scanning the earth every seven to 10 metres, Mr. Gingerich says. "It's a dimension of information further than even the geological community fully appreciates."
To send a geologist to collect "dirt bags" at selected points can cost between $150 and $500 a square kilometre, he says. "We can cover that
information at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time."
So intriguing are the prospects offered by eye-in-the-sky prospecting that Noranda undertook a project in July for the Ottawa-based
Canadian Centre for Remote Sensing to discover if the system could identify minerals beneath the ubiquitous lichen covering the rocks of the Canadian Arctic.
The findings, bound by confidentiality agreements with Ottawa and eight mining companies, will likely be released in March, Mr.
Gingerich says. "But I think we are pleased with the results."
Spectroscopy is not new but, until now, most of the detailed work has been done in the laboratory. Families or "themes" of minerals --
and a handful of specific minerals -- can be identified by the latest satellites but the information is still very coarse, Mr. Gingerich
says. It's detailed enough that I could go out and tell whether there were clay minerals or oxide minerals in the ground -- though it couldn't tell you much more," he explains.
Sophisticated government-sponsored airborne systems have been developed. One such device, tested by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration from a U2 spy-plane, was able to produce detailed maps of up to 300 minerals in the ground. But costs were
prohibitive -- even assuming a commercial company could get its hands on the aircraft and the ground-based Cray super computers necessary for filtering out unwanted information, such as aerosols suspended in the atmosphere.
"The turnaround time for a single acquisition was, at the earliest, six months," Mr. Gingerich says.
The billions spent "left technology looking for a place to go," and created both a business opportunity and a "pent-up frustration" to find some way of making the optical scanners more portable and commercially affordable in fields such as environmental monitoring and mining.
The Noranda research director says it also demonstrated that Ottawa may have shot itself in the purse earlier in the decade when it cut
funding for optical scanning and processing -- in which "we were second to none" -- to concentrate on radar satellite technology. "That's not really where the big dollars are. The real market is in optical," he says. As a result, there's now a push on to get a
satellite-based optical system functioning. NASA has already launched a 300-channel hyper-spectral satellite, which failed to reach orbit. Canada may eventually team up with either Australia or Europe in such a space-based system.
On a more down-to-earth scale, at least one Canadian university-based group has produced an aircraft-mounted system devoted to the
visible and near infra-red end of the spectrum, which is useful for mapping vegetation. But airborne prospectors need an instrument
capable of scanning deep into the short-wave infra red -- which contains key mineral information -- and processing the information
almost immediately.
Such a package, assembled in Australia, was developed for Earth Search Sciences. That should have left the Idaho company holding all the cards -- if it hadn't also dealt into the mining game, specifically in Kazakhstan, at the same time that junior companies were being
battered by the copper crash and the Bre-X Minerals Ltd. scandal.
"Timing was hell for them," Mr. Gingerich says. "So we ended up negotiating an investment in the company for the licences to the mineral use of the technology."
If the advantage offered by the airborne system is only fleeting -- space-based instruments will ultimately prove more cost-effective -- it will still have been a coup, Mr. Gingerich says.
"Time has a value. Whoever gets to [the next] Voisey's Bay is the big winner . . . Our hope is that by being the first to take surveys in some of the key areas of the world, we will identify those targets that people missed. That'll pay far more of a return than if this investment turns out to be the best piece of technology." |
