Detection of high potential gold mineralization areas using Landsat 8 data in Northeastern Sudan

Abstract

This investigation used Landsat 8 data for mapping lithological units and alteration zones to detect high potential areas for gold mineralization in Red Sea Hills in Sudan part of the Arabian-Nubian Shield (ANS). The study area contains three gold mines part of Ariab mining district in Red Sea Hills, Northeastern Sudan. There are three types of gold deposits in the study area (Supergene deposits, polymetallic massive sulphide deposits and The Ganaet deposits) are being mined in Hadal Auatib mine, Hassai mine and Kamoeb mine. The objective of this study was to find new high potential areas for gold mineralization in the area. Color composite, band ratio, principle component analysis, directional filtering, minimum noise fraction (MNF), spectral angle mapper (SAM), matched filtering (MF) and Mixture-Tuned Matched-Filtering (MTMF) were used for geological mapping in this study. The results of this study showed the distribution of the lithological units and the hydrothermal alteration zones along with new high potential areas for gold mineralization which can be used in the future and proved the ability of Landsat data in mapping these feature. The results indicate that Landsat 8 data are capable to identify lithological units and alteration zones at a regional scale. However the identification of specific hydrothermal alteration zone is not feasible. High potential areas have been identified in the study area. Fieldwork verified the image processing results.