Browsing by Author "Ngowi, Dickson E."

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    Mineral prospectivity modelling to delineate potential areas for gold deposits: a case study of the Lupa goldfield, South West Tanzania
    (The University of Dodoma, 2023) Ngowi, Dickson E.
    Conventional methods for exploring mineral deposits are becoming difficult to locate undiscovered deposits because their capability to find out concealed ore deposits is limited. New sophisticated methods are required for analyzing and integrating various geoscience datasets to locate new deposits. The aim of this study is to delineate prospective areas for gold deposits in the Lupa Goldfield by using weight of evidence model. The weight of evidence is a data-driven method for mineral prospectivity mapping that uses conditional probabilities to determine the relative importance of individual layers of evidence. The method establishes a spatial relationship between known mineral deposits and evidential maps to create a mineral prospectivity map. In this study, four evidential maps derived from geochemical, geological, geophysical and remote sensing datasets including a training sites layer of 64 mineral occurrences were generated and integrated to produce mineral prospectivity map. The results of this study indicate that; mafic and metamorphosed mafic rocks intruded by granitic rocks, proximity to faults, presence of geochemical gold anomaly and high magnetic anomaly were the primary geological features for recognizing gold mineralization in the Lupa Goldfield. The model results have revealed 5 classes ranked from the highest, high, medium, low and lowest favorability patterns with probability values; 0.051, 0.0426, 0.0225, 0.0172 and 0.0091 respectively. The highest favorable areas have the best gold potentials based on the presence of predictor patterns from all the four evidential maps. The model was evaluated and validated of which the results have revealed that, the use of weight of evidence model is successful and useful to locate prospective areas for gold deposits in the study area.