OZ Minerals asks – can open data and A$1m change exploration?

Image courtesy of Oz Minerals

The Explorer Challenge is on for explorationists from around the world to find new targets at the Mount Woods tenements of the Prominent Hill copper-gold project.

This is a crowdsourced challenge offered by OZ Minerals to peruse over two terabytes of their project data and pinpoint the most promising drill targets. The contest runs until the end of May 2019 with the top targets to be drilled later this year.

OZ Minerals CEO Andrew Cole believes that finding ways to work smarter with all the data on hand is the way of the future. He would expand traditional borders to bring together people with different skill sets.

“The iterative process of collecting different datasets, followed by geological interpretation can take a long time,” he said. “The Explorer Challenge is one way we can speed up the exploration lifecycle and analyze information at a much faster rate.”

OZ Minerals and the open innovation platform unearthed have partnered on this challenge and put up a prize pool of A$1m.

This article first appeared in The Canadian Mining Journal.