GOCAD® MINING SUITE SOFTWARE AS A TOOL FOR 3-D GEOSCIENCE DATA INTEGRATION AND MODELING

The GOCAD Mining Suite is an advanced, geoscience software platform, originally developed for the oil & gas industry, which is used to build and analyze quantitative, multi-disciplinary 3D Earth models. High quality 3D Earth models, such as those made with GOCAD, can form the basis for regional- to national-scale 3D geological mapping programs. Core capabilities of the GOCAD Mining Suite software include: precise structural modeling, explicit and implicit surface (wireframe) construction, stratigraphic and regular block modeling, as well as geostatistical analysis. Various add-on software modules are available which provide several 3D geological modeling environments, natural connections to geologically-constrained geophysical forward modeling and inversion, as well as exploratory and geochemical data analysis. These additional capabilities are useful for creating a well-constrained and robust 3D Earth model. A key tool in the GOCAD Mining Suite is 3D-GIS, an interpretive environment in which 3D spatial data can be queried, manipulated, and represented in a meaningful manner. A 3D-GIS facilitates access and analysis of complex, 3D geoscience data volumes. This paper will present an overview of the GOCAD Mining Suite software as well as examples of regional-scale 3D Earth modeling projects which have been performed with GOCAD. Such projects involve the integration of geophysical data, geological data, borehole and well data, seismic data, interpreted cross-sections, and other information. The output is a rigorous 3D model of the subsurface consistent with all geoscience datasets. Such 3D Earth models augment our understanding of the subsurface and can be a key component to successful 3D geological mapping programs.