Smart Exploration project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No.775971.

Europe has a favourable geology for hosting a variety of mineral resources. It covers a wide range of commodities including, for example iron, base and precious metals, REEs, PGEs, phosphate, and, last but not least, industrial and construction materials. All these materials are essential for sustainable economic growth of the EU, for its continued technological advancements and for maintaining and improving the modern life style. There are, however, challenges such as exploration of deep targets or difficulties (e.g., noise and accessibility issues) in the vicinity of the exiting mines where continued supply of ore needs to be secured and environmental impacts of mining minimised.

Smart Exploration, a strong research and application team supported by a variety of technologically advanced SMEs and mining industry, developed tools and methods for exploration in highly challenging brown-field areas. New ideas have also been developed and tested for green-field exploration. The goals have been achieved via development of new  multidisciplinary approaches as well as through novel reprocessing and handling of legacy exploration data. Data mining, drilling-target generations and deep probing with new airborne, surface, in-mine and borehole electromagnetic (EM), seismic and potential field methods have been developed.