For economic geology and other geological studies, the drill cores provide information on the prevalence and mineralogical, chemical, and physical properties of bedrock minerals. The drill core data provide information about the geographical dimensions of the mineral deposit and, among other things, the elemental concentrations, extractability, grindability, and beneficiation characteristics of minerals, and their potential environmental and health impacts.

The data preserved in cores may be important in the future, where some elements that are now insignificant may become essential. This has happened in the past, for example, to cobalt.

Multidisciplinary measurement data is collected from the drill core by machine and further utilised in the development of computational interpretation of digital data. The areas of development of the subproject are:
• Digital spectral geological and petrophysical measurement methods of drill cores
• Computational co-interpretation of site-bound variables from different digital measurement datasets
• Multidimensional modeling and representation as part of a chain of studies from exploration to exploitation of battery mineral deposits

The hyperspectral imaging data by scanning large drill core sets from the Finnish national drill core archive have been collected since 2018 to a large extent in collaboration with companies in the extractive sectors operating in Finland or research and innovation projects implemented by GTK that develop their operating conditions.

The digitalisation of the national drill core archive will contribute to the availability, storage, and enhanced research of archival materials alongside the overall support to the capacity development of the industry in cooperation with various stakeholders.

Studying drill cores takes a lot of time and the preservation of the material space. The GTK has archived to its national drill core archives in Loppi and Rovaniemi about 4,000 km of bedrock drill core material from around 36,800 state and private company drillings. They are stored in a total of 11 storage halls.

A geologist visually examining bedrock drill core and identifying minerals, and structural features of bedrock.

Example image of a drill core box with a mineral interpretation based on hyperspectral data. On the left is a photograph of a drill core box, in the middle and right is a mineral classification made from the same box made using hyperspectral data of the visible, near-infrared, shortwave infrared and long-wave infrared wavelengths.

Combined visual description of a computationally generated geological (colorful bar) and mineralogical (black line) interpretation based on the hyperspectral parameters of the drill core data. (Image: Hattu 3D project)