Services

International Groundradar Consulting Inc's staff are the world leaders in the application of advanced ground penetrating radar (GPR) technology to mineral exploration and resource evolution applications. With experience based on hundreds of project sites in over 60 countries on all six continents, Groundradar offers the most advanced proprietary GPR instrumentation and processing for suitable mineral exploration scenerios.

Although the cutting-edge GPR systems employed by Groundradar offer the highest resolution images of the subsurface, the suitablity of radar technology is highly site-specific. Established applications over the last 18 years have included nickel laterite and bauxite exploration, mineral sands mapping and alluvial paleochannel delineation. However, new environments are constantly being explored based on the recent release of advanced UltraGPR technology.

Often overlooked when proposing geophysical investigations are their inherent limitations. Geophysics relies on contrasts in physical properties between subsurface layers, or buried objects, in order to image targets. The geophysical methods employed must be sensitive to the property contrasts that are relevant to the site. All too often, inappropriate methods or aquisition parameters are used in environments where a careful analysis of the survey objectives and greater experience with a wider array of geophysical techniques would have suggested alternative methods or rejected teh use of geophysics entirely. Even when the appropriate techniques are used, the scale of the property contrast must be sufficient for target discrimination. Of additional consideration is the depth of investigation and the resolution required. Various types of GPR have different optimal penetrations, and can provide substantially different subsurface detail. In general, the greater the penetration depth required, the less the detail of the information obtained.

Selecting a Service Provider

Recent years have seen a growth in the number of small geophysical contractors who either rent necessary equipment from a manufacturer on an individual basis, or own one or two pieces of instrumentation and market these as panaceas to any sub-surface imaging problem. Geology is inherently unpredictable and complex on the scale of near surface investigations, and likewise, geophysical results of shallow investigations are often ambiguous or complicated. A geophysical contractor must posses teh breadth of knowledge to strategically select the instrumentaion that is most likely to solve a specific problem, as well the experience to suggest other methods where GPR is unlikely to perform well.