A NOVEL SPATIAL ANALYSIS APPROACH FOR ASSESSING REGIONAL-SCALE MINERAL PROSPECTIVITY IN NORTHERN FINLAND by

We applied spatial analysis techniques in investigating regional prospectivity in two study areas in Lapland, Finland. Different combinations of self-organizing maps, K-means clustering and fuzzy logic were used to analyse geophysical, geochemical and structural data from study areas in Enontekiö and Savukoski. The study demonstrated how the distribution of a suitable multidimensional dataset can be interpreted in terms of mineral prospectivity by utilizing spatial analysis, without any training data. The resulting models can help in highlighting and drawing attention to exploration targets that might be interesting for further investigations.