of Canada through the Targeted Geoscience Initiatives (TGI-4)
and Geo-mapping for Energy and Minerals (GEM-2)
programs.
These joint projects included investigations of specialty metals,
orogenic nickel-copper-PGE
deposits, and porphyry indicator
minerals in till from the Highland Valley, Mount Polley and
Gibraltar mines, and from the Woodjam project area.
The Survey is also developing new mineral exploration meth-
ods including the use of: 1) lead isotopes as an inexpensive tech-
nique for targeting volcanogenic massive sulphide deposits in
till-covered regions; 2) trace element characteristics of apatite to
fingerprint the major mineral deposit types (in partnership with
the University of Victoria); 3) proprietary government digital aer-
ial photograph stereo models to produce new till-potential maps
that allow industry to reduce unnecessary till sampling by up to 75
per cent; and 4) portable X-ray fluorescence (
XRF) instruments to
measure rare earth element abundances in field samples.
The preliminary results of these and other Survey projects
are published annually in the
BCGS publication, Geological
Fieldwork, and in publications by partners including Summary
of Field Activities (Geoscience BC) and Current Research (GSC).
As part of ongoing updates, 2014 saw an increase in the
number of documents available online from the Survey's
databases, which now include 34,000 assessment reports from
ARIS (Assessment Reports Indexing System), 900 reports in
COALFILE and 14,000 records in the MINFILE mineral occur-
rence inventory (with 1,700 new occurrences and 4,200 revised
entries). Property File, a collection of documents donated to
PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENT
