The nationwide mineral mapping project has entered its final analytical phase. During the Meet the Press on Friday, officials confirmed that interpretation of airborne geophysical data is now underway and expected to be completed by June this year. The data paves the way to identify high-potential mineral zones that could shape future investment and resource development.
The Department of Geology and Mines said the airborne geophysical survey, one of the country’s largest geological data initiatives has completed its field and data acquisition phase and is now fully in the interpretation stage.
Director General of Dept. of Geology and Mines, Phuntsho Namgyal, said, “During the interpretation phase, actually our in-house experts, geologists, geophysicists, sit with experts from Xcalibur Company from Australia, and we are synthesizing and processing data. So that would actually culminate into a natural resource prospectivity map.”
Once completed, the government will decide how the information can be used and whether parts of it can be shared publicly or used to attract investment in the mining sector.
Officials said the survey will help the country move from general exploration to more targeted searches, saving time and resources by focusing only on areas with potential mineral deposits.
The director general added that “We’ll have an undirected blueprint of all the minerals. Then we’ll have an undirected, focused, detailed blueprint. That will be our main objective. And after that, what should we do? We’ll have targeted geochemical surveys. Geochemical surveys will give the exact content of the minerals within the prospectivity and so on. Then after that we’ll do high-resolution ground geophysics. Then we’ll do precision geological mapping. So, these three will be the next phase.”
The survey covered about 15,500 square kilometres, or around 40 per cent of the country’s total land area, using helicopters fitted with advanced magnetometer and LiDAR equipment.
Samten Dolkar
