Structural and mineral exploration study at the transition zone between the North and the Central Eastern Desert, Egypt, using airborne magnetic and gamma-ray spectrometric data

Abstract

The transition zone between the North and the Central Eastern Desert of Egypt has been investigated using airborne magnetic and radiometric data to better characterize the subsurface structures, the tectonic framework, and mineral occurrences in the area. The magnetic data were subjected to several filtering and depth estimation techniques including edge detectors, Euler deconvolution, 2D forward modeling and 3D inversion. Statistical trend analysis of the lineaments obtained from geological and filtered magnetic maps shows that the major tectonic trends are NNE–SSW, NE–SW, and NW–SE, in addition to less predominant ENE–WSW and N–S trends. Two parallel shear zones trending NE–SW were detected. The causative magnetic structures were imaged at depths varying from the surface down to 2200 m. A number of strong uranium anomalies associated with Younger Granites and Dakhla, Duwi, and Quseir formations were identified which are worth being considered for further ground investigations.

Keywords:

• Airborne magnetic
• gamma-ray spectrometric
• mineral exploration
• structural imaging
• Eastern Desert
• Egypt

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editor and five anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions which greatly helped us to improve this paper.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Authors’ contributions

Ismael Ibraheem: Supervision, Conceptualization, Validation, Writing—Reviewing and Editing, Ahmed El-Husseiny: Methodology, Software, Visualization. Amal Othman: Investigation, Software, Visualization, data curation, writing—original draft preparation. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available upon reasonable request from the corresponding author.