To retun to Flim and Flam:
"Resonance Coupling technology is a new method of mineral exploration using satellite based data analysis. It is the only technology to the best of our knowledge that locates and analyses mineral deposits directly. For example, if you are searching for diamonds we look for diamonds and not the host kimberlite rock nor the magnetic qualities of the surroundings."
Diamonds occur in a mineable rock at a concentration of 20 carats per 100 tonnes in South Africa. They may occur in Canadian style deposits, which only come to surface or near surface in 50% of cases, at a concentration of up to 300 carats per 100 tonnes. A 100 tonnes is 100 million grams. A carat is 1/5 of a gram. So at least a diamond deposit would be 60/100,000,000 or 0.6 ppm and at worst zero, but out of perhaps 200 kimberlites you might get one between.04 ppm and 0.6 ppm if the were were detectable. Assuming in a diamond field so to speak you got one kimberlite every 36 square miles, then you would need to explore 7200 square miles to find our rich-enough rock.
Detectability of raw diamonds on the surface of a kimberlite:
Assuming a roughly square diamond were 1 carat, it would appear in our putative kimberlite once in every 5 tonnes to once in every 333 kilograms. A carat of diamond is 0.0571 of a cubic centimetre. It's one dimension is the cube root of that, or .000186 centimetres. At that thickness of surface rock one would cover 594 million square centimetres, 59,500 square metres or 6 hectares. (.06 of a sq kilometre) to find one diamond of size. If a diamond were distinguishable from a remote location, say 100 metres away, from other rock or carbon, the chances of finding it on the surface would be the error rate of the system times the area covered, by the chance of exposure of the rock times the chance of finding a mineable kimberlite (on a surface area basis, 1 metre in 10,000 metres is our kimberlite-chance and 1 in 200 is our economic chance in our putative rich field**). Micro diamonds may raise the chances a fair bit as they are fairly ubiquitously distributed in some kimberlites. They would be contained in, let's say, 10,000 times the volume or 100 times the area of rock of one whole diamond of the same volume. But at their size they may be buried 99% of the time. So we are back to the same equation it would appear. The resolution necessary to detect these small stones would appear to be prohibitively high, even with a walking speed detector a few feet from the surface.
It sounds small.
** If one sq. metre out of 10,000 were kimberlite, then 1 sq metre out of 2 million is economic. If the burial is 80% in overburden, then there is one chance out of 8 million that any one metre will be detectable as kimberlite. If we cover every metre then the chance is one out of 8 that we will detect the rich enough kimberlite, but only every 0.06 sq kilometres has a chance of a surfacing diamond. So we have one chance in X 60,000 = 2 chances in a million of detecting it, if our system has that resolution to see 0.003 square centimetres from 100 meters away. At one foot focal length, the system sees 929 square metres. So the resolution of our system would have to be 3,096,768,000 to one. This would require 4,637 pixels per centimetre. This would be state of the art detection and I think it would strain the ability of even hyper ganged computers working at high data rates to keep up. At a speed of 15 metres per second there would be 139 gigabytes per second generated. A compression ratio of 3 to one brings that back to 46 billion bytes per second. 500 boards with 8 processors, with 4,000 data cables might keep up at rates of 11 million bytes per second, but hyper spectral systems with 124 channels bring us back to 1.364 billion bytes per data cable per second. A fair bit of data with 4,000 cables/frequencies. 5 terabytes per second. 18,000 terabytes per hour. Compressed. I think we might have to wait for storage capacity and speeds to catch up to our data needs.
If a fly by IR method could find minerals and distinguish any compounds which are rock forming or xenocrystic, such as diamond, pyrope, diallage, then it should be useful. My off the top guess is that it would be more useful to look for major minerals that form over 1% of the rock. That might form some sort of whole rock guess system that could use ground follow up. This is the theme of hyperspectral now and it may be useful. Even trying to see pyrope with composition seems out of reach at present.
BWTFDIK?
Our clue may be in "resonance coupling". Resonant with what? And how does it couple?
If you ask me it couples best with the explorer's wallet.
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