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Young Person’s Lecture Competition 2021
March 11, 2021 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
The annual MinSouth heat of the Young Person’s Lecture Competition (YPLC) will be held on Thursday, the 11th of March beginning at 6:00 pm.
Two students from Imperial College (ICL) and three from Exeter University (CSM) will give 15-minute presentations on topics they have chosen and which are relevant to the materials and mining industries.
The abstracts of each of the presentations:
Alex Lipp – All the world in a grain of sand? Geochemical surveying by unmixing of large-river sediments.
Geochemical surveying provides information essential to mineral exploration and environmental baseline monitoring. However, dense spatial surveying is costly, slow and logistically challenging. Novel methods which can produce geochemical maps but minimise these downsides are therefore highly desirable. Typically, geochemical surveys sample stream-sediments from small river catchments across the target region. Here, I will describe how we can instead use smaller numbers of samples extracted from large rivers to reconstruct the geochemistry of the source region. This novel approach ‘un-mixes’ the geochemistry of downstream sediment samples using an inverse method to produce a geochemical map of the source-region. This approach is demonstrated with a case-study from the Cairngorms, UK: using just 67 downstream samples we are able to produce geochemical maps that compare favourably with independently gathered geochemical-survey maps produced with more than 100 times as many samples. This novel method could therefore reduce the logistical, temporal and financial cost of geochemical mapping.
Finlay Goodwin – The Tin Bearing Pegmatites of Uis, Namibia
The area of Uis is situated within the Erongo region of Namibia. The area comprises the margins of several granite plutons, likely to represent the upper, fluid-saturated cupola of intrusions that themselves contain zones of intense tourmalinisation and pegmatite formation. These granite-hosted pegmatites do not contain tin mineralisation. By contrast, the exogranitic pegmatites in the Uis pegmatite belt are pervasively stanniferous and CGM-bearing, and are believed to be metamorphogenic in origin, related to the late stages of the Damaran orogenesis – accordingly they are likely to be genetically unrelated to the adjacent granite intrusion. Characterisation of the contrasting mineralised and unmineralised pegmatites is considered to be important for any future assessment of the prospectivity of the region. In this presentation, an alternative hypothesis is put forward, presenting evidence that the Uis pegmatite swarms may have evolved along a single liquid line of descent from a granitic parent magma.
Alexander Moss – Exploration for LCT Pegmatites in Leinster, Ireland
Lithium bearing pegmatites were first discovered along the eastern margin of the Leinster Granite, Ireland in the 1980’s. At the time it was noted “if only we have had a use for lithium”, now, 40 years on, societal demand for lithium is set to increase due to the rise in interest in EVs and the green agenda. Following this increase in interest in lithium, prospecting for lithium in the area was renewed. Modern mineral exploration techniques were deployed, including geostatistics, to build a model of lithium prospectivity for the region. The known occurrences of lithium mineralisation were used to train a fuzzy logic model of lithium prospectivity along the eastern margin of the Leinster Granite, before extending its utility to northern portions of the Leinster Granite. This study presents the geostatistical methods utilised, including potential issues with the technique and ideas for future work and improvements to
the model.
To register to attend the YPLC competition, click the Link below to go to Eventbrite.