INRTU Wins Russian Mining Award for the First Time
The Siberian School of Geosciences (SSG) of INRTU has won the “Russian Mining Award” competition for the first time. The university's technology of combined unmanned frequency and pulse sounding of the Earth (UAV-TEM/FS) was recognized as the “Breakthrough Solution of the Year”. The diploma and the “Bronze Miner” award were presented to the scientific supervisor of SSG, Alexander Parshin, at the MINEX Russia 2025 forum in Moscow.
The UAV-electromagnetic Earth sounding technology is the result of work by the Siberian School of Geosciences and companies within the consortium as part of the strategic project iGeoDesign under the “Priority 2030” program. The INRTU team aims to transform the theory and practice of exploration geology to increase profitable reserves of solid minerals and groundwater. Scientists believe the most promising areas are the development of integrated UAV aerogeophysics, “non-traditional” exploration geochemistry, and mobile drilling.
“Previously, we were the first in the world geological exploration to create and apply the technology of semi-airborne electromagnetic soundings of the Earth, operating on the principle of transient methods. This improved the economic efficiency of impulse electrical exploration. However, the transformation of the entire exploration practice was hindered by significant limitations of this group of methods, such as low information content in the upper part of the section and the ability to obtain data only from depths greater than 40-50 meters, while the near-surface part is often very important too,” said Alexander Parshin.
The new technology, submitted for the "Russian Mining Award", enables the creation of maps, sections, and 3D models of the geoelectric structure of the Earth, starting from the first meters.
“Due to the frequency mode of electromagnetic soundings, data can be obtained even at a frequency of 10 kHz. We demonstrated this particularly well during engineering geological surveys in northeastern India. High depth penetration is also maintained thanks to the transient field mode.The new combined technology makes it possible to completely abandon a number of common but already outdated ground-based methods, such as contactless electric field measurement (CEFM), gradient array methods, TEM (transient electromagnetic method), and to replace large field crews with small groups of specialists equipped with UAV systems. Unmanned aerial vehicles are already being used instead of magnetic and gamma surveys, making full-scale expeditions unnecessary at the exploration stage,” Alexander Parshin outlined the prospects for scaling the award-winning technology.
Within the MineExplorer session, he also told industry colleagues about how the complex of accelerated geological exploration methods created at INRTU contributes to the development of a junior model for exploiting Russia's mineral resource base. A report on research from the first two exploration licenses of the “Aunakit” project was included in the conference program “Innovations, advanced technologies and optimization methods in the field of forecast, search, evaluation and exploration of solid minerals”.
