Density and magnetic susceptibility of major rock types within the Abitibi greenstone belt: a compilation with examples of its use in constraining inversion

Abstract

Geophysical inversions give non-uniqueness solutions and unless constrained by appropriate initial values and geological constraints can give unrealistic results. One of the critical constraints can be the physical property values of different lithologies. We have compiled a density and magnetic susceptibility database consisting of thousands of measurements collated from different organisations and/or projects across the Abitibi greenstone belt. Statistical tools (histograms, quantile-quantile probability plots and boxplots) are applied to characterise systematically major and minor lithologies. We observed that the magnetic susceptibility frequently has a bimodal distribution, while density is typically unimodal. Our results are summarized in a table that includes the representative mean (or median) and a range of acceptable values. These values can be used to better understand the regional geology, but in this paper, we used the tabulated properties in a geophysical/petrophysical inversion of gravity data from the Chicobi area in the Abitibi subprovince to show the level of improvements that the petrophysical constraints can add to an unconstrained model. When our density database is used to seed the initial guess in a gravity inversion, an anomalous zone becomes apparent that was less evident on an unconstrained inversion.

KEYWORDS:

• Petrophysics
• density
• magnetic susceptibility
• Abitibi greenstone belt
• inversion

Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge that Metal Earth project, Harquail School of Earth Sciences, Laurentian University has provided a platform to perform this research. They are grateful to Mira Geoscience, Aspentech, Seequent, GeoTomo, Adobe and ESRI for providing software to help us undertake our research. For a detailed report describing this characterisation, refer to Eshaghi, Smith, and Ayer (2019). The contribution number of this publication is MERC-ME-2019-175. The compiled petrophysical database is available at https://merc.laurentian.ca/sites/default/files/Petrophysical_Database_Abitibi_Compilation.rar.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF), Metal Earth project.