Botswana Diamonds (BOD) is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize the discovery of new diamond deposits, IDEX Online reports.
According to the UK-based explorer, it aims to harness AI’s capabilities to analyze vast amounts of data with human-like comprehension. Through its collaboration with UK-based International Geoscience Services Limited, BOD has developed “mineral prospectivity technology” named Xplore.
Chairman John Teeling expressed the challenge of analyzing Botswana’s extensive mineral database efficiently due to its sheer size. With the second-largest diamond exploration database in Botswana, comprising 380 gigabytes of data and 260,000 files, BOD covers approximately 95,000 square kilometers of data, including 375,000 kilometers of airborne geophysical data, 606 ground geophysical surveys, around 228,000 soil sample results, and 32,000 drill hole logs.
The AI-driven “system acts much like a geologist but can function quicker and more efficiently,” said BOD in a statement. “Vast data-sets are processed through AI that finds logical gaps in the data and learns to correct them. This exercise is expected to yield fresh insights that will offer drillable targets previously unseen.” Moreover, Xplore’s capabilities extend beyond diamond detection, as it claims it can also identify other mineral deposits.
