As a partner of GSEU, the Ukrainian Association of Geologists within the framework of the tasks of Work Package 8 disseminates information regarding some published news and scientific articles in Ukraine on the main thematic areas of the project
The characteristic feature of many deposits of critical raw materials is spatial chaotic fluctuations of grades (strongly skewed and lognormal distributions, soft geological boundaries etc.), which essentially limit the use of traditional economic evaluation methods and, especially, geostatistics. A possible solution may be application of various fractal methods based on the principle of multiple divisibility of geological object to the size of its elementary part, called fractal. Today fractal methods are widely used in life sciences, physics, mathematics, and chemistry, and are increasingly becoming used in biology and Earth sciences. For example, geological and mining for oil and gas apply fractal methods as a standard tool. A review of the literature in these areas shows that there are many issues in the field of critical raw materials that can be solved using fractal methods. Polokhivske deposit of LCTtype pegmatites with monomineralic fine-grained petalite ore was chosen for the case study.
Pegmatites of Polokhivske deposit lack zoning and are characterised by uneven distribution of multi-grained mineral associations. Composition of pegmatites depends on the quantitative ratio of potassium feldspar, albite, and petalite. The difficulty to reveal any ore control features is explained by the proximity of the silica saturation and alkalinity of the hosting granites and fluids that transformed them. The moving average depth-grade method was used to solve specified issue. The clear trend of rhythmically increasing lithium content with depth was uncovered. This indicates that the deposit can be modelled as separate mineralised zones, each of which contains areas enriched with lithium and the location of such enriched areas must obey a certain regularity.
This number-size fractal method was applied in order to separate potentially ore-bearing zones and mineralised geochemical anomalies of lithium from its background values. It has been proved the validity of this method to justify direction of exploration, economic evaluation, and mine planning. No. 3 (2024): Mineral resources of Ukraine.