| Summary: | Glaciations of the Quaternary Period have had a profound impact on the Canadian landscape and surficial sediments. Understanding glacial landforms and sediments has thus helped develop fundamental knowledge of past glaciations and how they affected landscapes, sediments, and climates. Because Quaternary Period sediments and landforms are ubiquitous in many regions of Canada, studying and understanding them is also important for numerous applications such as mineral exploration. Successful diamond exploration in the Northwest Territories, Canada, for instance, requires detailed knowledge of the glacial history, including ice flow phases and the net effect of several glacial processes. This is because glacial sediments often cover bedrock of interest, and because they can be used for tracing certain minerals, referred to as indicator minerals, back to a buried source. Traditional and proven exploration techniques using glacial sediments evolved from tracing mineralized boulders back to their source to a greater diversity of methods using indicator minerals and geochemical pathfinders. Typically, regional scale programs involve collecting surface samples of glacial sediment (till) and analyzing compositional patterns of interest, sometimes in combination with geophysics to find the most promising bedrock targets. However, this analysis becomes a complex 3D problem in areas of variably thick till. There is also a temporal component often involving shifts in ice flows and thus of sediment transport directions. To address these issues, companies sometimes use a grid-style drilling strategy where till samples are collected vertically at different depths. However, this is a costly and time-consuming approach that may be applied with incomplete knowledge of the full glacial history and/or with limited understanding of bedrock topographic effects and changing subglacial conditions on 3D dispersion. To address this knowledge gap, this research uses a large reverse circulation (RC) drilling and hand-sampling dataset from ...
|
|---|