Dear Dr. Aliyu,

an answer to your question strongly depends on for what type of analyses you are going to try and get a piece of advice. Is it a well site-study, in other words capturing digital data in the field on-site or are you going to sample the drilling mud and ship the samples to a laboratory off-site. Moreover what specific sort of investigations are you interested in, is you interest geophysically-, mineralogical or chemical-oriented. I can list almost all chemical methods from XRF to IR-spectroscopy, but I think it will not help you very much to get drowned in a wave of techniques. Another decisive question is the aim of your drill hole. Is it sunken for reasons of economic geology or true scientific purposes? If these questions are left unanswered it is hard to provide you with an efficacious solution

Best regards

H.G.Dill

Dear Dr. Aliyu,

an answer to your question strongly depends on for what type of analyses you are going to try and get a piece of advice. Is it a well site-study, in other words capturing digital data in the field on-site or are you going to sample the drilling mud and ship the samples to a laboratory off-site. Moreover what specific sort of investigations are you interested in, is you interest geophysically-, mineralogical or chemical-oriented. I can list almost all chemical methods from XRF to IR-spectroscopy, but I think it will not help you very much to get drowned in a wave of techniques. Another decisive question is the aim of your drill hole. Is it sunken for reasons of economic geology or true scientific purposes? If these questions are left unanswered it is hard to provide you with an efficacious solution

Best regards

H.G.Dill

Dear Dr. Aliyu,

an answer to your question strongly depends on for what type of analyses you are going to try and get a piece of advice. Is it a well site-study, in other words capturing digital data in the field on-site or are you going to sample the drilling mud and ship the samples to a laboratory off-site. Moreover what specific sort of investigations are you interested in, is you interest geophysically-, mineralogical or chemical-oriented. I can list almost all chemical methods from XRF to IR-spectroscopy, but I think it will not help you very much to get drowned in a wave of techniques. Another decisive question is the aim of your drill hole. Is it sunken for reasons of economic geology or true scientific purposes? If these questions are left unanswered it is hard to provide you with an efficacious solution

Best regards

H.G.Dill

Hi Dr. Dill

The study is not an in situ analysis. It will involve shipping of the drilling mud to laboratories for mieral contents analysis. The only analysis I can conduct based on my background in environmental radioactivity is to measure the specific activities of primordial radionuclides in the drilling mud. The purpose of the drilling job is for water well. Unfortunately,  the company that is involved has drilled upto 200 m into an extension of Capt. Mealony hill Keffi.  I have collected some sample of the mud.

Dear Dr. Aliyu,

take samples and split them into two halves, one aliquot is used for the mineralogical composition, using a fine-grained (< 20 µm) and a coarse -gr. (20 to 300 µm) batch, the other aliquot, being representative of the drilled section use for a whole rock chemical analysis by means of XRF. Please keep aside a representative part in case of need. The fine fraction I use for clay minerals by means of XRD, the coarser one for heavy and light mineral analyses using the petrographic microscope. It is a rough scheme which is designed for a routine analysis. You can of course expand this program, but it is always a matter of money and time. The drill spacing depends upon your scientific aims. I wonder what the lithology is like and what your studies are aimed at.

 Best regards

H.G.Dill

Dear Dr. Aliyu,

take samples and split them into two halves, one aliquot is used for the mineralogical composition, using a fine-grained (< 20 µm) and a coarse -gr. (20 to 300 µm) batch, the other aliquot, being representative of the drilled section use for a whole rock chemical analysis by means of XRF. Please keep aside a representative part in case of need. The fine fraction I use for clay minerals by means of XRD, the coarser one for heavy and light mineral analyses using the petrographic microscope. It is a rough scheme which is designed for a routine analysis. You can of course expand this program, but it is always a matter of money and time. The drill spacing depends upon your scientific aims. I wonder what the lithology is like and what your studies are aimed at.

 Best regards

H.G.Dill

The two basic methodologies are xrd and xrf. What if one chooses to investigate the mineral and chemical contents and to see if these  could be related to the activity concentrations of any of the radionuclides like Uranium and Thorium. An expert told me that the lithology is so far the same (fresh-basement) and they have drilled for over 200 m into the rock 

Dear Dr. Aliyu,

could please describe in few words the lithology and the geological setting. I have an overview of the economic geology of the region but my knowledge of the regional and local geology is not surprisingly moderate.

Hi Harald,

The local geology of the area of interest to Abubakar is Older granite, commonly referred to as the Migmatite-Gneiss Complex, and is though to have resulted from a complex association of deformative, shearing, folding, granitization and migmatisation processes. These rocks were affected by two major orogenic episode, the Eburnean orogeny occurred at about 1950 +-250 my and the second episode, the Pan African orogeny (600+-150 my) culminated in the emplacement of the older Granite and is responsible for the wide spread of amphibolite facies metamorphism of the basement complex.

The Migmatite Gneiss rock in this area is mainly made up of migmatites, gneisses, migmatitic gneiss, augen genisses and porphryblastic gneisses. The older granites are biotite granites.

I hope this will be of help.

Thanks Mohammed for providing this vital information.  Mohammed is conversant with the local geology because he worked with the Department of Geology and Mining, Nasarawa State University Keffi for a number of years.

Dear Dr. Harald I hope Mohammed's response will be of help to you.

Hi Harald and Muhammed.

I conducted elemental content analysis by using Neutron activation analysis for samples at various depth. I wouldn't hesitate to share the data with you people for us to develop it into a paper. 

Here's my email: [email protected]