Imaging of hydrothermal altered zones in Wadi Al-Bana, in southern Yemen, using remote sensing techniques and very low frequency–electromagnetic data

Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Arabian Journal of Geosciences

Publication Date

9-1-2019

Abstract

© 2019, Saudi Society for Geosciences. Economic mineralization and hydrothermally altered zones are areas of great economic interests. This study focusses on hydrothermal altered zones of high mineralization potentials in Wadi Al-Bana, in southern Yemen. An azimuthal very low frequency–electromagnetic (AVLF-EM) data acquisition was conducted in search for mineralization in the study area. The study integrated observations from geophysical field data with others extracted from object-oriented principal component analysis (PCA) to better map and understand mineralization in the investigated area. This technique was applied to two data sets, ASTER and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) imagery. The results of PCA revealed high accuracy in detecting alteration minerals and for mapping zones of high concentration of these minerals. The PCA-based distribution of selected alteration zones correlated spatially with high conductivity anomalies in the subsurface that were detected by VLF measurements. Finally, a GIS model was built and successfully utilized to categorize the resulted altered zones, into three levels. [Figure not available: see fulltext.].

ISSN

1866-7511

Publisher

Springer Verlag

Volume

12

Issue

18

Last Page

16

Disciplines

Life Sciences

Keywords

Azimuthal VLF-EM survey, Hydrothermal alteration, Mineral exploration, Object-oriented PCA, Remote sensing

Scopus ID

85071739115

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

no

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