The system sitting on harsh rocky ground with snow-capped hills in the distance.

LANDTEM™ in action in Canada connected to a Crone receiver.

Locating the ore others miss

CSIRO’s LANDTEM™ is helping unearth large mineral deposits worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

  • 15 April 2008 | Updated 15 March 2013

The problem

Deeply buried deposits of minerals such as nickel, gold and silver are of great interest to the mineral industry because most ore found to date has been on or just below the surface.

However, these deposits can be hard to find because conventional coil magnetic sensors are not sensitive enough.

In Australia, exploration for these minerals is even more difficult because the overburden (material above the deposit) is often highly conductive.

Our solution

CSIRO’s LANDTEM™ is a highly portable exploration tool which can spot the difference between ore and conductive overburden, even when the ore body is deeply buried. LANDTEM™ uses highly sensitive magnetic sensors known as SQUIDs (Superconducting QUantum Interference Devices).

LANDTEM™ is helping unearth large deposits of nickel sulphide and silver worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It has also:

  • found several previously undetected large nickel sulphide deposits in Western Australia
  • cut exploration costs by 30 per cent to a company working in difficult terrain in northern Quebec in Canada
  • clarified coil system data at BHP Billiton’s Cannington silver mine in Queensland.

Our partners

Developed in collaboration with Canadian mining company Falconbridge, LANDTEM™ is now made under license by Australian company Outer-Rim Exploration Services.

In the first commercial sale of a SQUID-based system for mineral exploration, Canadian company Crone Geophysics recently bought two LANDTEM™ systems for use in North America.

LANDTEM™ may be used with either a single channel receiver, such as Crone's 25-bit receiver, or a three channel receiver, such as Electromagnetic Imaging Technology's 16-bit SMARTem receiver.

Technical details

LANDTEM™ accurately measures the magnetic (B) field, rather than the rate of decay of induced eddy currents used by conventional coil systems.

LANDTEM™ offers:

  • direct measurement of the B-field
  • sensor systems with up to three axes
  • easy portability
  • electronic, auto-tuned SQUID sensors
  • liquid nitrogen coolant (one litre gives over ten hours operation)
  • low noise (white noise floor approximately 350fT/ Hz
  • excess noise corner less than 40Hz.

Read about Three-dimensional mineral mapping made easy.

  • LANDTEM™ is a registered trademark of CSIRO Australia.