Abstract

Discovered in 2010, a full 22 years after the previous discovery at Lombador, Semblana is the sixth of seven known deposits within the greater Neves-Corvo mining concession. Located in a mature terrain less than 3 km from the operation’s headframe, the lengthy time it took to discover Semblana was affected by macroeconomics, multiple changes in company management, and technological advances in equipment, inversion methods and visualisation tools. The fact that Semblana lies 800 m below surface and has neither a strong gravity anomaly nor a stellar EM response didn’t help.

The story of Semblana was first presented at Exploration ’17 by West and Penney (2017). Had modern exploration tools been available earlier, history would have likely been different. The story of Semblana is therefore worth upgrading and repeating, not to re-write history, but to re-run the discovery playbook using newer data and modern inversion methods. Two stories will be presented: Semblana as it happened, and Semblana as it might be discovered today.

Recording