The Ferensola Gold Project, Sierra Leone, West Africa
The Project
The Ferensola Gold Project is located in Koinadugu District in north eastern Sierra Leone, approximately 290 km from the capital city, Freetown. Multicommodity exploration company Sula Iron and Gold plc., holds the licence for the project. Recent work has defined an exploration target with the geological controls to mineralisation being confirmed through drilling and the results of an IP survey leading to the identification of 8.5km of strike.
Using Leapfrog’s movie function, Sula’s Non-Executive Technical Director, Howard Baker, has produced an impressive presentation to communicate target scale and to lift the project’s profile to the wider investment community.
Howard Baker comments, “The movie has become one of our key marketing tools. It’s enabled us to effectively communicate a really detailed project with fantastic impact. I can also easily update it with new data as the project progresses.”
Situation
The Sula-Kangari Greenstone Belt is a N-S to NNESSW trending belt of high-ground comprising Archean rocks. The belt comprises amphibolites, maficultramafic metavolcanics and schists of the Sonfon Formation, overlain by Banded Iron Formations, metasediments and metavolcanics of the Tonkolili Formation.
On a prospect-scale, gold mineralisation is known to be hosted by structurally controlled quartz-pyrite shear zones with Sula collecting detailed structural data during drilling which assists in the interpretation of what is likely to be a geometrically complex system.
Sula believe that if you assume the geological controls to be complex from the outset, then the on-going interpretation will be significantly easier. If you assume the geological controls will be easy from the outset, the interpretation will turn out to be difficult, ultimately incurring greater costs throughout the exploration journey. Utilising Leapfrog’s highly advanced structural tools and being able to rapidly visualise and effectively communicate this complex geology is key to moving the project forward.
Sula completed a maiden drilling campaign in Nov 2015 which resulted in high grade gold being intersected in eight out of ten of the drillholes, recovering a strike length of approximately 480 metres. From the followup IP Survey, six targets were identified highlighting 8.5km of potentially mineralised zones and from only a portion of the licence. Drilling is planned for 2017 to test these newly identified targets and Sula plan to utilise Leapfrog to gain an instant understanding of the project’s geological controls as drilling occurs and the structural and geological data is collected.
Response
Using the raw IP data, the individual IP targets were implicitly modelled by Sula in Leapfrog Geo, allowing Sula to quickly visualise the extent of the potentially mineralized zones. Howard Baker was then able to use Leapfrog’s movie function to generate an impressive video presentation that summarised all the exploration data collected to date. “The video enables us to readily communicate the geology and the scale of the targets to a broad range of audiences. It has become one of our key marketing tools and has already had over 350 views in a matter of weeks.”
Continues Howard, “I found the movie function very easy to work with. As long as you’re reasonably computer savvy and you know your data, you can fairly quickly produce a video. I’d estimate that the video component only took me a day to complete. Probably the most time-consuming part was in developing the script, recording the audio and getting the timings right with the video. The whole movie was completed in around three days. It’s very easy to generate and has an immediate impact. I will be doing more in the future and updating as we add new data from on-going exploration activities.”
“The resolution is very good and you are able to achieve a high quality finish that really impresses.”
Howard Baker, Non-Executive Technical Director, Sula Iron & Gold plc
“The movie has become one of our key marketing tools. It’s enabled us to effectively communicate a really detailed project with fantastic impact. I can also easily update it with new data as the project progresses. “
Howard Baker, Non-Executive Technical Director, Sula Iron & Gold plc
The movie function has a high frame rate of up to 60 frames per second. It works by dragging scenes into a storyboard with transitions added automatically. You can select the finished resolution, which goes up to HD. Files are created as Windows Media Video (wmv) files.
Howard comments, “The resolution is very good and you are able to achieve a high quality finish that really impresses. I’ve tried to do the same thing in other packages and none offer this advanced capability that’s delivered in such a simple and user-friendly way.” The movie function and general ease of visualising data was one of the key reasons Howard Baker acquired Leapfrog and indeed, Howard states that “prior to even commencing the IP survey, I had in my mind a video showing the results in 3D using Leapfrog.”
Outcome
The video enables Sula to quickly and effectively raise the profile of the project amongst the wider investor community. Being able to see the project unfold as a video presentation gives instant impact and rapidly communicates scale, potential and excitement.
Seequent’s Director of Product and Innovation, Tim Schurr, says, “Visualisation is at the heart of Leapfrog and giving our users the opportunity to easily produce movies to help share and communicate geology adds even more value to what we offer. It’s great to see Sula making effective use of this tool and we wish them success in generating interest amongst investors.”