Editorial Team

Oyu Tolgoi PCA analysis

Remember our post about the surface material maps for Rio Tinto’s Oyu Tolgoi mine? The copper mine has a small surface expression but a big underground network. You can spot the 2km wide and 500m deep pits of the southern Oyu deposit even in the 20m Sentinel-2 data. The occurence secondary copper carbonates, -sulfates and -silicates on the surface gave the deposit the name “turquoise hill”. Last week Friederike Koerting showed a deterministic mineral map of the area based on our ReSens+ analysis. Today is a comparison to that with the widely used statistical principal component analysis PCA which indicates areas of spectral homogeneity – but nothing more. The PCA aids your exploration by detecting surface patterns, but ReSens+ points straight to the expected mineralisation! See our previous post for details. This means, your field geologists can save money & time and spent more of their valuable time on the areas that are actually promising.