PACIFIC workshop and town hall meeting at Lakehead University
June 10, 2019 – Thunder Bay, Ont.
The PACIFIC workshop, supported by the European Union, highlights the growing demand for minerals and metals for sustainable energy and presents a low-cost and non-invasive technique for mineral exploration.
This new technique locates and directly images ore bodies beneath the surface.
The workshop will be held on the 12th and 13th of June at Lakehead University in the Centennial Building, room 3031.
What is PACIFIC?
PACIFIC (Passive Seismic Techniques for Environmentally Friendly and Cost-Efficient Mineral Exploration) is a consortium of universities, government agencies and private companies that is developing new mineral exploration tools with support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program.
What is passive seismic technique for imaging?
The passive seismic technique allows geologists to look inside the Earth’s crust and detect ore deposits, using geophones deployed at the surface. A geophone, as the name indicates, is a device that ‘listens to the Earth’ by recording seismic waves. Seismic noise is generated permanently at the surface of the globe, due to the interaction between the atmosphere, the oceans, the solid Earth, and also to human activities due to blasting, trucks, trains, wind turbines. The technique reads the fingerprint of the subsurface and produces 3D tomographic images down to depths of about one kilometre.
Workshop description
The workshop will briefly summarize the status of mineral exploration worldwide, the characteristics of ore deposits, and the societal perception for the mining industry. Then it will highlight the fundamentals of common geophysical methods used for mineral exploration, with a focus on passive seismic methods, and special application of the passive reflection seismic technique at Marathon.
The program is available here.
Town hall meeting
5:15 pm on Wednesday, June 12 – Centennial building room 3031
The town hall meeting will be an opportunity for representatives of local and national media (TV, radio, newspapers and social networks) to ask questions and learn more about passive seismic technology, and review preliminary results of the tests conducted in Marathon, Ontario.
Participation to the workshop and town hall meeting is free (subject to seats available). If you are interested in attending, please contact Rosemary Fauyjaloun at rosemary.fayjaloun@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr.
The Department of Geology is pleased to promote this workshop as the activities complement the research activities of Lakehead University faculty and students.
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Media: For more information or interviews, please contact Brandon Walker, Communications and Marketing Associate, at (807) 343-8177 or mediarelations@lakeheadu.ca.
Lakehead University has approximately 9,700 full-time equivalent students and 2,000 faculty and staff in 10 faculties at two campuses in Orillia and Thunder Bay, Ontario. Lakehead is a fully comprehensive university: home to Ontario’s newest Faculty of Law in 44 years, the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, and faculties of Engineering, Business Administration, Health & Behavioural Sciences, Social Sciences & Humanities, Science & Environmental Studies, Natural Resources Management, Education, and Graduate Studies. Maclean’s 2019 University Rankings place Lakehead University among Canada's Top 10 primarily undergraduate universities and in 2018 Research Infosource named Lakehead Research University of the Year in its category for the fourth consecutive year. Visit www.lakeheadu.ca.