Assessing the Accuracy and Feasibility of Ambient Noise Tomography for Copper Exploration: Insights from Synthetic Data Generation with Realistic Geological Models

In the last decade, passive seismic techniques have found use in the mineral exploration sector. In particular, ambient noise tomography is a low cost viable option that can outperform competing geophysical methods when imaging down to a few kilometers depth. However, at present it does not belong to the core approaches (e.g. magnetic, gravity, etc.) mainly due to a lack of experience in the industry. Novel approaches often go through a period of testing where the industry is familiarized with the technique and expectations are "adjusted". In order to speed up this testing period, an extensive review of the technique and its capabilities for real geological settings is required.

In this work, we build geological models of well known mineral deposits and generate ambient noise cross correlation functions (ccfs) for synthetic deployments. The ccfs are then used in a state of the art fully probabilistic ambient noise tomography to assess the strengths and weaknesses of this technique. This work will allow the industry to better understand the methods capabilities and adjust their expectations for exploration purposes.