Speaker: María Luján Ganuza (Visualization and Computer Graphics (VyGLab))
Geologists usually deal with rocks that are up to several thousand million years old. They try to reconstruct the tectonic settings where these rocks were formed and the history of events that affected them through the geological time. A big challenge is to characterize a particular geologic region in terms of its tectonic setting.
The spinel group minerals provide useful information regarding the geological environment in which the host rocks were formed. They constitute excellent indicators of geological environments (tectonic settings) and are of invaluable help in the search for mineral deposits of economic interest.
In 2001, Barnes and Roeder defined a set of contours corresponding to compositional fields for spinel group minerals. Geologists usually use this contours as empirical tectonic discriminators that empower to estimate the tectonic environment where a particular spinel composition could have been formed.
The current workflow requires the scientists to work with different applications to analyze spinel data. It starts with the digitization of contours and continues with an exhaustive and tedious manual comparison of overlapping diagrams. They do use specific diagrams, but these are usually not interactive.
In this talk, we present the Spinel Explorer - an interactive visual analysis application for spinel group minerals. The Spinel Explorer includes most of the diagrams commonly used for analyzing spinel group minerals and provides a semi-automatic, interactive detection of tectonic settings for an arbitrary dataset based on the Barnes and Roeder contours.