Recent Advances in Geomathematics - An International Symposium

Celebrating Frits Agterberg’s half-century of publication activity in geomathematics, this volume’s 28 timely papers, written by his friends and colleagues, treat a variety of subjects of current interest, many of them also studied by Frits, including: spatial analysis in mineral resource assessment, quantitative stratigraphy, nonlinear multifractal models, compositional data analysis, time series analysis, image analysis, and geostatistics. Professor Agterberg published his first paper as a graduate student in 1958 and has since produced (and continues to publish) a steady stream of research papers on a wide variety of subjects of interest to geomathematical practitioners. Most of the papers included here address methodology and feature practical case studies, so that the book likely has broad appeal to those interested in mathematical geosciences, both to academic researchers seeking a comprehensive overview and also to practitioners of geomathematical approaches in industry.

This book provides a wealth of geomathematical case history studies performed by the author during his career at the Ministry of Natural Resources Canada, Geological Survey of Canada (NRCan-GSC). Several of the techniques newly developed by the author and colleagues that are described in this book have become widely adopted, not only for further research by geomathematical colleagues, but by government organizations and industry worldwide. These include Weights-of-Evidence modelling, mineral resource estimation technology, trend surface analysis, automatic stratigraphic correlation and nonlinear geochemical exploration methods. The author has developed maximum likelihood methodology and spline-fitting techniques for the construction of the international numerical geologic timescale. He has introduced the application of new theory of fractals and multi fractals in the geostatistical evaluation of regional mineral resources and ore reserves and to study the spatial distribution of metals in rocks. The book also contains sections deemed important by the author but that have not been widely adopted because they require further research. These include the geometry of preferred orientations of contours and edge effects on maps, time series analysis of Quaternary retreating ice sheet related sedimentary data, estimation of first and last appearances of fossil taxa from frequency distributions of their observed first and last occurrences, tectonic reactivation along pre-existing schistosity planes in fold belts, use of the grouped jackknife method for bias reduction in geometrical extrapolations and new applications of the theory of permanent, volume-independent frequency distributions.