Company:Mira Geoscience

Short description: Geoscience software and consulting services

Mira Geoscience Ltd. is a privately owned Canadian company that specializes in providing advanced geoscience solutions for the mining and the mineral exploration industries, including the application of advanced geological and geophysical modelling, 3D-GIS technology, integrated interpretation and visualization, open-source technology, 4D multi-disciplinary data management, and geotechnical hazard assessment.

Mira Geoscience specializes in software solutions and consulting services. The company is headquartered in Montreal and has offices in Vancouver, Canada, as well as Brisbane and Perth, Australia. The company also has employees working remotely from other locations across the world.

History

Mira Geoscience was founded in 1999 by John McGaughey, who holds a MSc in Geological Engineering and a PhD in Geophysics from Queen’s University. Prior to founding Mira Geoscience, he spent 10 years at the Noranda Technology Centre as a Senior Scientist in their rock mechanics group.

In 1999, John McGaughey, in collaboration with Marc Vallée, introduced the Common Earth Model (term originated in the Oil & Gas industry) to mining and mineral exploration through the application of integrated interpretation, which is defined as the interpretive process by which a ‘common earth model’, consistent with all data and geological reasoning, is created. This adaptation to mining was inspired by the common earth model (also known as shared earth model) work published by S. Garrett in 1996.

In 2006, Mira Geoscience published 'The common earth model: A revolution in mineral exploration data integration'. The mining-specific workflows are still available through GOCAD Mining Suite, a customized software extension of Aspen-SKUA^TM, developed by Aspen Technology for the Oil & Gas industry.

In 2015, Mira Geoscience first released Geoscience ANALYST, a free 3D visualization and communication software for integrated, multi-disciplinary geoscience and mining data and models. The software modules Geoscience ANALYST Pro and Geoscience ANALYST Pro Geophysics are paid.

Geoscience ANALYST also enables the integration to open-source and advanced geophysical inversion codes, such as:

• Python―through geoh5py, an open-source Python API, and the geoapps repository, allowing for custom scripting and automation to enhance the analytical capabilities of the software.
• VP Suite―designed for 3D modelling and inversion of gravity, gravity gradient, total magnetic field, magnetic gradient, and TEM data. Models are geologically based, they work directly with geological contact geometries as well as physical property distributions within geological units. This model parameterization lends itself to a variety of forward modelling and inversion applications.
• User interface to UBC-GIF―industry-standard codes developed by the University of British Columbia Geophysical Inversion Facility including 3D modelling and inversion programs for gravity and magnetic gradient data, resistivity and induced polarization, and electromagnetics. The inverse problem is solved as an optimization problem that minimizes the earth structure subject to adequately fitting the data and honoring additional specified constraints, including geological constraints. Geoscience ANALYST Pro Geophysics can be used to prepare data, create meshes, constrain inversions with geological information, run inversions, and visualize results.

In 2022, Mira Geoscience received funding from the Mining Innovation Commercialization Accelerator (MICA) to accelerate the development of '4D Data Integration for Mining' through their software application Geoscience INTEGRATOR, a data management system first released in 2014 that enables storing, 3D visualization, querying, analysis, and communication of mineral exploration and 4D geotechnical engineering data, models, and metadata.

In 2024, Mira Geoscience published 'A Framework for Mineral Geoscience Data and Model Portability' on GEOH5, an open format data structure that provides a documented, public, easy-to-use, vendor-neutral, and permanently accessible means of storing and disseminating models, data, and metadata. GEOH5 is based on open-source HDF5 technology. Mira Geoscience also developed geoh5py, the open-source Python API that can read from and write to the GEOH5 data structure, and Geoscience ANALYST, the free 3D viewer that displays the contents of GEOH5 files as tables, charts, documents, maps, cross-sections, and 3D visualizations.

Recognitions

In December 2017, Mira Geoscience received the Ultra Deep Mining Network's Outstanding Achievement in Commercialization Award for "a technical innovation and commercial sale that is quickly becoming the industry’s most comprehensive and advanced geotechnical data management and hazard computation system, Geoscience INTEGRATOR."

In March 2023, Mira Geoscience was awarded with the best extended abstract at ASEG 2023 for their technical paper on 'Integrated 3D modelling and associated machine learning targeting: the Jaguar Greenstone Belt example'. Mira Geoscience completed an integrated interpretation in the Jaguar Greenstone Belt (JGB), in Western Australia, on behalf of Round Oak Minerals (now Aeris Resources). The prospectivity analysis at Jaguar used a Machine Leaning approach, namely Random Forests, to generate a 3D Mineral Potential Index based on different combinations of input exploration vectors.

In January 2024, Mira Geoscience received the 2023 AME Innovation Award for "leading the development of an open-format data structure called GEOH5, an open-source documented, public, easy-to-use, vendor-neutral and permanently accessible means of storing and disseminating models, data, and metadata."

See also

• Geologic modelling
• List of free geology software