The modelling of structural geology is often an over-looked, misunderstood and underutilised facet of the mining process, where deeper knowledge of structural trends can provide vital insights into design considerations, safety, ore genesis and structural controls on mineralisation. With the release of the GEOVIA Surpac 6.9 Structural Suite, geologists now have the capability to visualise, interpret and plot these trends.
The modelling of structural geology is often an over-looked, misunderstood and under-utilized facet of the mining process, where deeper knowledge of structural trends can provide vital insights into design considerations, safety, ore genesis and structural controls on mineralization.
With the release of the GEOVIA Surpac 6.9 Structural Suite, geologists now have the capability to visualise, interpret and plot these trends. The key benefits and use cases of this toolset are outlined in the GEOVIA post, entitled ‘Extending Geology Modeling for Structural Geologists with the Surpac Structural Suite’.
For roles such as an Underground Geologist, Underground Planning Engineer or an Underground Surveyor, it is necessary to be able to view planned underground workings with existing drill holes and to view planned drill holes with existing workings.
This capability helps ensure the safety of both underground miners and workers on the surface who are operating within the area of influence from the dangers associated around drillholes in the areas of influence.
To view workings subject to exiting and planned drillholes:
Many users of GEOVIA Surpac struggle with how to effectively select specific drillholes when completing database tasks such as display, compositing or data extraction. To view or process a select number of holes requires some setup in the collar table and knowledge of Surpac’s Drillhole Constraint functionality. This is often an overlooked and forgotten area of the Surpac toolset, but yet can provide value by streamlining workflows. This GEOVIA blog post will now discuss the setup and methodology to utilise this capability.
Grade estimation for undulating or folded deposits can often be challenging. A variety of solutions can be used to reduce the bias in the search parameters during block model estimation, one of which is dynamic anisotropy interpolation.
Dynamic anisotropy interpolation is an estimation method which takes into consideration the local variation of the domain orientation into the block estimation.
Why use dynamic anisotropy?
As an underground geologist, one of the weekly jobs maybe to map the structures and lithological contacts in the development drives. This information can then be used to update grade control and resource models, geotechnical models, and help with future mine planning.
In this post we will discuss how we can bring the sketched wall mapping into Surpac.
Geological mapping in ore mining integrates interpreted models with real data from surfaces like walls or benches, enabling geologists to refine models, Drill & Blast engineers to adjust blast parameters, metallurgists to optimize processing, and geotechnical engineers to assess wall conditions and refine ground support designs. In GEOVIA Surpac, coloring a DTM by geology involves loading the DTM and geological data, assigning attributes, defining a color scheme, applying it to the DTM, validating the output, and sharing it with stakeholders for operational use.
The below steps outline how to color a DTM by geology in GEOVIA Surpac:
How to color a DTM based on a Dfield and utilize this information to plot with puncture points. This is the last…
As a Geologist, you may be asked to produce a contoured gram meter plot to outline areas of the ore body that have the greatest value or potential ore shoots. This plot can also highlight areas of wider stopes, that then require more ground support during mining. This plot can also highlight areas where more drilling is required to upgrade the resource/reserve.
This is the 3rd post in the series “plotting long sections”. The files created in the 1st article, from the functions “Database>Composite>by Geological Constraints” and “Database>extract>zone thickness and depth” are required for this process.