As the quest for mineral resources becomes increasingly challenging, the mining industry is looking for new technologies that would permit exploration of the most difficult parts of their mining concessions. Our intention is to show that passive seismic imaging provides a robust, cost-effective and environmentally friendly solution, especially in the case of greenfield projects in difficult exploration settings.

In this webinar, we will present a passive seismic workflow that we proposed and applied in the context of the Gerolekas survey, in Central Greece, which was launched in the framework of the Smart Exploration project. Our workflow is based on the exploitation of the body waves of local microearthquakes and the application of Local Earthquake Tomography (LET), using the earthquakes’ P- and S-wave first arrival times, and reflected-wave Seismic Interferometry (SI), using the earthquakes’ P- and S-wave coda. The obtained results (velocity models and virtual reflection responses, respectively) are jointly evaluated and interpreted to determine the exploration target, while the LET models are also used during the reprocessing of legacy active seismic data.