A New Semi-greedy Approach to Enhance Drillhole Planning

In advanced exploration projects or operating mines, the process of allocating capital for infill drilling programs is a significant and recurrent challenge. Within a large company, the different mine sites and projects compete for the available funds for drilling. To maximize a project’s value to its company, a drillhole location optimizer can be used as an objective tool to compare drilling campaigns. The fast semi-greedy optimizer presented here can allow for the obtention of close to optimal solutions to the coverage problem with up to three orders of magnitude less computing time needed than with integer programming. The heuristic approach is flexible as it allows dynamic updating of block values once new drillholes are selected in the solution, as opposed to existing methods based on static block values. The block values used for optimization incorporate kriging estimate and variance, estimate of indicator at cutoff grade and distances to existing or newly selected drillholes. The heuristic approach tends to locate new drillholes within the maximum risk areas, i.e., within less informed zones predicted as being ore zones. Applied to different deposits, it enables, after suitable normalization, comparison of different drilling campaigns and allocation of budgets accordingly.

     

The 27-Day Signal in Sunspot Number Series and the Solar Dynamo

We analyze the Wolf number daily series WN (1849 to present) as well as two other related series characterizing solar activity. Our analysis consists in computing the amplitude of a given Fourier component in a sliding time window and examining its long-term evolution. We start with the well-known 27.03- and 27.6-day periods and observe strong decadal variations of this amplitude as well as a sharp increase of the average value starting around 1905. We then consider a packet of 31 lines with periods from 25.743 to 28.453 days, which is shown to be a better representation of the synodic solar rotation. We first examine the temporal evolution of individual lines, then the energy of the packet. The energy of the packet increases sharply at the beginning of the 20th century, leading by more than two decades the well-known increase of the Wolf number. The nonaxisymmetry of sunspots increases before the total increase of activity and may be considered as a precursor. We discuss briefly and tentatively this observation in terms of solar dynamo theory.