Does Prospecting Equipment that Can Identify Minerals Underground without Digging Exist?

Factual Questions
1

A friend of mine is asking me for help to find some kind of equipment, portable so that it could be carried on a backpack, that can detect the presence of metals/minerals beneath the ground to a depth of around 100 meters. She wants to get it for her mining company in China. I was skeptical at first but she said that she had seen it used by another company, and that it was like the magnetotelluric systems like LANDTEM that are on sale, but apparently not that.

Consulting Wikipedia seems to suggest that such systemsexist but I can’t find detailed examples of specific ones for purchase. Any help or advice (including any debunking, this is decidedly not my field) is appreciated, thanks!

2

Depends upon what the question really means. Directly detecting the presence of useful minerals isn’t going to happen. I have seen a highly dubious claim of a nuclear magnetic resonance system, but simple analysis of the physics shows it is more scam than science.

I suspect she means a backpack mounted magnetic system - one that directly reads the magnetic field, and allows a ground based survey to be reasonably quickly performed. Fro minerals work you would need a ground survey or helicopter survey as you need tight line spacing and also want the sensor closer to the surface than a fixed-wing survey would allow.

She probably wants one of these.

Data acquisition isn’t trivial - you need a separate base station to measure the diurnal variation of the magnetic field - which includes energy at almost any period, including short term spikes from ionospheric events. Both the backpack and base station time their acquisitions with a GPS locked clock allowing subtraction of the noise.

Interpretation of the data is a specialised field, and isn’t just a matter of looking at images/maps of the data.

What you can interpret from the data is the presence of magnetic mineralisation, or other magnetic geology. Magnetic mineralisation can often be markers to allow determining where other minerals are present. It gets complex quickly.

3

She lose her keys?

I’ve gotten drunk and lost my keys and wished there were something like that too.

4

Thanks! I’ve relayed the information, it was really helpful. I thought that it seemed almost like dowsing but hopefully what is actually possible is good enough.

It would be useful for that too; sometimes when I lose my keys they end up 50 or even 65 meters underground.