Geophysical exploration is getting more and more difficult—many of the easily explorable
ore-bodies have been discovered and are already being exploited. Finding new mines
requires new technologies and tools. Transient electromagnetics (TEM) is widely used in
mineral exploration, but conventional sensors (especially induction coils) cannot fulfil the
needs anymore: deep targets, very conductive targets or targets under conductive
overburden are more easily (or sometimes only) detected using SQUIDs. In this paper we
will focus on low temperature SQUID magnetometers. As the systems are applied
worldwide it is necessary to strengthen them for all conceivable application scenarios. Here,
we report on the latest development of these systems which are now routinely
used in South Africa, Australia, Finland and Canada. This paper highlights the
main features of the system and describes one example from mineral exploration.
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