Singularity index and multifractal analysis of magnitude magnetic transforms: a new methodology to explore Au mineralization with application to Esh El Mallaha, Egypt

The primary objective of mineral exploration is to discover new mineral-rich zones within targeted regions. The fractal concentration area (C-A) and the magnetic maps are now extensively used in mineral prospecting. Unfortunately, the calculation of the reduced-to-pole (RTP) maps suffers from several drawbacks. It requires a prior knowledge of the inclination and declination of the source magnetization. It can be complicated to determine the direction of the source magnetization vector in certain conditions because of the large and significant remanent magnetization of the source if present. Furthermore, at low magnetic latitudes, the RTP computation is unstable. However, a new class of transforms known as magnitude magnetic transforms (MMTs) overcome these drawbacks. Such transforms have nonnegative distributions and exhibit significantly higher centricity with regard to the observed anomalous field. Their anomaly patterns are much less influenced by the direction of the magnetization vector than the observed total magnetic intensity. Due to these benefits, in this work, these transforms are used instead of RTP transform as a base for fractal/multifractal analysis of the magnetic signal from the Esh El Mallaha area, Eastern desert to delineate gold mineralization and hydrothermally altered and potential zones. Moreover, are used for the singularity analysis S-A in a novel integrated workflow. The results of this study show a promising approach that can be utilized globally for mineralization detection strategies.