YAOUNDÉ, Cameroon – A ruined mining site rests at the heart of the village of Akak I, nestled on the outskirts of Cameroon’s capital Yaoundé. This quarry site is no longer active. After being completely mined by Transatlantique Cameroon Ltd, a subsidiary of the Chinese consortium Cameroon Meilan Construction Conglomerate (CMCC), it was abandoned. All […]
Mongabay seeks to raise interest in and appreciation of wild lands and wildlife, while examining the impact of emerging trends in climate, technology, economics,and finance on conservation and development.
In-situ mineral prospecting studies in the tropics face challenging environmental conditions leading to paucity of data and structural mapping of new mineralizations. Here we present the case of the tropical mining goldfield of Ketté in Cameroon to demonstrate remote sensing techniques for mineral exploration purposes. In this investigation Visible Near Infra-Red (VNIR) and Short Wave Infra-Red (SWIR) bands of Landsat-8 (OLI) and Landsat-7 (ETM+) images were used with field data for lineaments and hydrothermal alterations mapping. Semi-automatic and automatic extraction methods were applied through sobel directional filters to detect the contours in the image. PCA, MNF transformation and a band ratio of 4/2, 6/5 and 6/7 were applied to map alteration minerals. The result revealed NE-SW to ENE-WSW main trends. Gold mineralization occurrences are spatially associated with WNW-ESE to NW-SE (110°–140°) ranging lineaments/faults and show a strong correlation with medium to high lineame