Breccia Pipe Estimation: a new approach using non-stationary covariances
Résumé
The El Teniente mine is famous not only as one of the largest known porphyry-copper ore bodies but also, among geologists, for its typical breccia pipe named “Braden”, an almost vertical poorly mineralized cone, located at the center of the mine and surrounded by early-stage mineralizations. As the edge of the pipe constitutes the limit of the deposit and of the mining operation, estimating it accurately is important. In this paper, we are interested in estimation of the elevation of the pipe surface using a geostatistical approach based on non-stationary covariances. Previous approaches have been applied on this dataset by Séguret and Celhay (2013). The proposed estimation method offers an integrated treatment of all aspects of non-stationarity (mean, variance, spatial continuity) in the modelling process. The proposed method has revealed an increased prediction accuracy when compared to standard stationary method, and demonstrated the ability to extract the underlying non-stationarity from a single realization. A comparison of predictions and prediction standard deviations maps indicates that the proposed non-stationary method captures some varying spatial features (such as locally varying anisotropy) in the data that are not present using the stationary method, the outcome appears more realistic.
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