Sacco, D. A.

A priority of the Northwest Territories Geological Survey’s Slave Province Surficial Materials and Permafrost Study is to support and stimulate mineral exploration by providing an improved understanding of ice‐flow history; the distribution, thickness and stratigraphy of surficial materials; and their implications for the interpretation of geochemical and mineralogical data. To facilitate this, a robust exploration data set consisting of kimberlite indicator mineral and geochemical data was compiled, standardized and evaluated for the Lac de Gras (NTS 076D) and Aylmer Lake (NTS 076C) map areas, in the Northwest Territories, in an effort to better inform and focus exploration efforts in the region. The standardization was designed to identify and mitigate differences in analytical results related to sampling and analytical protocols, regional variation and surficial material genesis. These differences were quantified using exploratory data analysis, and then mitigated using a combination of data levelling, filtering and separation into subpopulations consisting of comparable data. The standardized data were evaluated using anomaly thresholds unique to each data set, resulting in a general increase in the discernibility of dispersal patterns when compared to the original data. This report also identifies sampling and analytical protocols that yielded the best analytical results, and several regions within the study area where the present publicly available data do not adequately represent the potential for economic mineralization.