We are a professional prospector from Kalgoorlie, Western Australia with over 20 years of prospecting experience throughout the WA goldfields and an experienced software engineer. Together we have formed Goldfinder Pty Ltd, currently a 2-man team committed to making the best prospecting software available so that Goldfinder becomes the de facto, go to, gold finding app in Western Australia.
I have found many multi ounce gold nugget patches using soil sample data. The ability to search for high value gold soil samples anywhere in Western Australia is something I, along with many others have desired for quite some time.
Goldfinder has been put together, combining many sources of publicly available, but often complicated data. The ability to search for high value soil samples, plotting them on a map and then selecting map overlays, to view and find potential gold nugget patches in a single web app is only the beginning.
The foundation of why we decided to create this web app in the first place.
Other alternatives, such as DEMIRS own Geoview web app do not provide an easy-to-use soil sample search function. Geoview requires users to zoom into an area, turn on geochemistry, select a soil sample icon (which would provide little more than a sample ID and no value) then manually download from the WAMEX report files and sort the soil sample data in a comma separated file and then somehow manually get that data back onto a map. While I was able to make it work for myself it was a painful and a terribly slow process.
Exploration companies in Western Australia are required to report their exploration activities and exploration results to DEMIRS and then after about 5 years after this information is generally made publicly available for use by the next generation of exploration and future prospectors. The soil sample data that GoldFinder uses comes from DEMIRS publicly available mineral exploration data, we have done the hard work for you and created an easy soil sample search in GoldFinder, ready to help you find gold.
Once you’ve searched an area with a few on-screen high value soil samples you can easily export the soil sample points to a KML file (“Export Results to KML button”) which be used directly in third party apps such as Trilobite and Google Earth. Only the top 500 soil sample values will be export to a KML file. It is recommended to zoom into your specific areas of interest first before exporting.
Using the GoldFinder soil sample search is simple and configured by default so that you can zoom into any area or tenement within Western Australia and can be disabled by clicking the “Soils” Checkbox in the Overlays Panel. The default soil sample threshold is 30ppb (parts per billion) which is a basic starting point for finding high value soil samples. Advanced users can change this value as they see fit to widen or narrow their search results.
Once you’ve searched an area with a few on-screen high value soil samples you can easily export the soil sample points to a KML file (“Export Results to KML button”) which be used directly in third party apps such as Trilobite and Google Earth. Only the top 500 soil sample values will be export to a KML file. It is recommended to zoom into your specific areas of interest first before exporting.
The publicly available database provided by DEMIRS is far from perfect. We’ve calculated that there is only a 87% completion of soil sample IDs to gold soil sample values. In other words they are missing the ppm or ppb value in the database. These can for the most part be manually extracted by going to the WAMEX report also known as “A Number” report and downloading the Geochem file and opening the soil sample CSV file in Excel
Some soil sample data has erroneously been recorded in the database in the wrong units. These will typically show up on the Goldfinder app as a bunch or block of very high value soil samples. We have manually fixed some however there are many more in the database that need correcting. There is a "Report Sample" button in which users can submit requests to us and then we can manually review and correct.
Occasionally you’ll come across supposed high value soil samples but on closer inspection and by clicking on each one of them they all appear to have the same value for example there might 5 or 10 results in an area that all have the same result like 0.05ppm. Unfortunately, these will need to be treated with caution and double checked by manually going to the WAMEX A number and into the Geochem csv file and manually confirming the values.
There is a "Report Sample" button in which users can submit requests to us and then we can manually review and correct.
Unfortunately, the whole of Western Australia has not been densely soil sampled. In fact, there are areas of land sometimes spanning 10s of kilometres in diameter in known gold producing regions without any publicly available or digitised soil samples.
Another issue is that some areas have been soil sampled too sparsely for example sampled every 200m apart. Meaning there could a rich gold patch, reef or deposit in between the soil samples and the soil sample data would not have captured it.
Unfortunately, most high value gold soil samples will not lead directly to a significant gold discovery. There are many reasons for this such as the following;
The database we are using is sourced from DEMIR's publicly available database which is a mix of good data, incomplete soil sample data and erroneous errors. DEMIR's database has unfortunately been an inadequately government-maintained database compiled from the annual exploration data submissions from the various mining and exploration companies holding tenements throughout Western Australia for the last 25 to 30 years.
The database also doesn't contain all the non-digitized data from approx. the mid-1990s and earlier. There were extensive soil sampling campaigns by the many exploration companies from approx. the 1970s through to the mid-1990s throughout Western Australia. The results from these soil sample programs mostly only existed on printed hard copies, which have been scanned into pdf documents in recent years and placed in the WAMEX database, however these have for the most part not been transferred over into the DEMIR's soil sample database. Some exploration companies over the years have taken it upon themselves to extract some of this old data and have re-submitted to DEMIRS in digitized form as part of their desktop exploration studies so a small portion of this old data is contained within the soil sample database.
I have personally had some success delving into these old exploration and soil sample data reports for where modern digitized soil sample data does not exist, however it is very time consuming and often in a coordinate system that doesn't translate very well.
Having said all that the soil sample data that we currently in have in Goldfinder is still certainly valuable in terms of finding gold. There are many known gold nugget patches, reefs and deposit that correlate well with this data and many more waiting to be found.
Some key takeaways
For our Goldfinder web app to be most effective we’ve had to recreate the all the standard mapping information that would be required to for finding gold.
At the moment we have the following list of maps that can be selected and viewed:
Topo 250K
Current implementation of TOPO 250K maps is lacking detail and can only be viewed at view levels of 3km and above. We will be looking into better maps.
100k and 250k Geological Mosaic
For Some Reason DEMIRS has published a low quality version of the 100K Geological Mosaic. We will be fixing this with a higher quality 100K soon.
100K Interpreted Bedrock Geology
This is also currently hosted on publicly available streaming server from DEMIRS and appears to be quite buggy in its implementation. If it is not fixed soon we will implement hosting our own streaming servers to avoid future issues.
For our Goldfinder web app to be most effective we’ve had to recreate the all the standard mapping information that would be required to for finding gold.
The overlays we have currently implemented are
We have implemented what we think is a better version of a tenement database than what is provided by DEMIRS. We have enhanced controls which allow for filtering and will continue to add new features.
One of the many great features we currently have implements such as the option to select all the dead special prospecting licences highlights all the areas where typically small-scale prospectors have found gold which could aid beginner to advanced prospectors as to where others may have had some success and add to their list of search options.
The tenement database should be updated every week day at approx. 3am. A note should appear in the tenements overlay control panel of when the tenements were last updated for peace of mind.
Gold has been preselected by default for ease of finding old mines, current mines and deposits. We have also implemented an advanced filtering panel in which the more advanced user can tinker to their hearts desire. There is also a handy legend for deciphering the on-screen symbols.
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