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A field technique for rapid lithological discrimination and ore mineral identification: Results from Mamandur Polymetal Deposit, India

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This work illustrates the efficiency of field spectroscopy for rapid identification of minerals in ore body, alteration zone and host rocks. The adopted procedure involves collection of field spectra, their processing for noise, spectral matching and spectral un-mixing with selected library end-members. Average weighted spectral similarity and effective peak matching techniques were used to draw end-members from library. Constrained linear mixture modelling technique was used to convolve end-member spectra. Linear mixture model was optimized based on root mean square error between field- and modelled-spectra. Estimated minerals and their abundances were subsequently compared with conventional procedures such as petrography, X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence for accuracy assessment. The mineralized zone is found to contain azurite, galena, chalcopyrite, bornite, molybdenite, marcacite, gahnite, hematite, goethite, anglesite and malachite. The alteration zone contains chlorite, kaolinite, actinolite and mica. These mineral assemblages correlate well with the petrographic measurements (R 2 = 0.89). Subsequently, the bulk chemistry of field samples was compared with spectroscopically derived cumulative weighted mineral chemistry and found to correlate well (R 2 = 0.91–0.98) at excellent statistical significance levels (90–99%). From this study, it is evident that field spectroscopy can be effectively used for rapid mineral identification and abundance estimation.

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Acknowledgement

The authors are thankful to Department of Science and Technology, Government of India for financial support through research grant (NRDMS/11/1291/2007).

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  1. Department of Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, 400 076, India

    D RAMAKRISHNAN, M NITHYA, K D SINGH & RISHIKESH BHARTI

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  1. D RAMAKRISHNAN
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RAMAKRISHNAN, D., NITHYA, M., SINGH, K.D. et al. A field technique for rapid lithological discrimination and ore mineral identification: Results from Mamandur Polymetal Deposit, India. J Earth Syst Sci 122, 93–106 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-012-0255-x

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