Zijun Zuo, PhD
Z. Zuo1,2, X. Tu1,2, Q. Di1,2, L. Zhao1,2
1CAS Engineering Laboratory for Deep Resources Equipment and Technology, Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing,China
2College of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing,China
The Thunderbird V–Ti–Fe oxide deposit in the “Ring of Fire” region of Ontario, Canada, exhibits pronounced high-density and strong magnetic signatures. However, conventional single-dataset geophysical inversions suffer from severe nonuniqueness and difficulty in enforcing consistent structural constraints between density and magnetic susceptibility models. In this study, we introduce a joint inversion technique based on a joint minimum-entropy functional, which captures structural similarity between different physical-property models without requiring a prior structural information, while effectively suppressing spurious coupling in uncorrelated regions. We apply this method to airborne gravity gradiometry (AGG) and total magnetic intensity (TMI) data acquired over a 6 × 7 km² area of the Thunderbird deposit. Compared with standalone inversions, the joint inversion produces significantly more focused models with sharper boundaries under a comparable data misfit of approximately 3%, successfully recovering a structurally coherent representation of the ore body and substantially reducing inversion uncertainty.