Usage of remote sensing and geographic information sciences in gold-silver exploration

The application of Remote Sensing techniques and Geographic Information Sciences have greatly improved the exploration of minerals. In this study, the argillic alteration associated with Gold-Silver mineralization were extracted with the proposed Illite index by considering the geology, and landcover of study area. The derived argillic alteration zones were then integrated with other geologic information such as lithology and faults to predict the potential gold locations. The illite index was proposed by examining the extracted image spectra and the USGS spectra of illite because of illite's close association with the gold-silver mineralization within the study. The illite index uses ASTER image and is a ratio of band 7 by band 6. The principal component analyses were also performed to validate and compare the hydrothermal alteration result obtained from the illite index. The weights of evidence and the fuzzy logic model were used to produce the gold potential map of the study area. The Ovacık Gold Mine was identified by both the weights of evidence and a fuzzy logic model. The mineral potential map and the proposed band ratio index would help in reducing the exploration work to the most probable mineralized zones.