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Detection of Hydrothermal Alteration Zones using Landsat 8 OLI image: A Case Study of Gold Prospecting in Nyongwon Area, DPR Korea

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Abstract

This paper focused on the detection of alteration zones associated with the hydrothermal gold deposit using Landsat 8 OLI image data. In this paper, the hydrothermal alteration zones in the study area were detected from visible–near-infrared (VNIR) and shortwave infrared (SWIR) bands of Landsat 8 OLI image data. One of the important issues for detecting hydrothermal alteration zones is to reduce the effects of the vegetation spectrum that affects the spectral feature extraction of the hydrothermally altered minerals in the relatively dense cover area. In this paper, we extracted the feature of the vegetation spectrum in the area using normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and mixture tuned matched filtering (MTMF) technique, then subtracted the corresponding vegetation abundance from the image pixel spectrum, finally we obtained the image with reduced vegetation effects. In the study area, the mapped hydrothermal alteration zones are mainly regions with high content of iron oxide and clay minerals and these are regions closely associated with hydrothermal mineralization. Crosta technique was used for mapping these altered zones. In this paper, principal component analysis (PCA) was carried out by selecting Landsat 8 OLI bands 2, 4, 5, 6 for mapping iron oxides and Landsat 8 OLI bands 2, 5, 6, 7 for mapping clay minerals. These alteration zones including the iron oxides and clay minerals in the study area were clearly represented in the generated images. These alteration zones are valuable for prospecting the gold deposit based on the ore geological characteristics of this area.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their thorough reviews of the manuscript which helped us to improve this paper.

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  1. Department of Geology, Kim Il Sung University, Ryongnam-Dong, Taesong District, Pyongyang, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

    Un Song Pak & Chol Ung Pak

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  1. Un Song Pak
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Correspondence to Un Song Pak.

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Pak, U.S., Pak, C.U. Detection of Hydrothermal Alteration Zones using Landsat 8 OLI image: A Case Study of Gold Prospecting in Nyongwon Area, DPR Korea. J Indian Soc Remote Sens 49, 2249–2259 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12524-021-01385-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12524-021-01385-8

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