Map Layers Guide

What each layer on the GeaSpirit map shows, where it comes from, how to read it — and, just as important, what it does not mean.

How to read GeaSpirit maps

Data ≠ discovery · Signal ≠ deposit · Prospectivity ≠ probability · Priority ≠ certainty

Three kinds of layer

Mineral Prospectivity — in depth

Mineral Prospectivity is a screening layer that highlights areas where the available evidence is comparatively more favourable for further mineral investigation.

What one grid cell means

Each value represents an area, not an exact point. A 0.25° cell is roughly 25 km across (varying with latitude), so the score is regional prospectivity — a place to look harder, never a drilling target.

Colour scale

• Strongest — converging evidence
• Elevated
• Moderate
• Low–moderate
• Emerging / weaker

Colour represents the model score only. It does NOT represent deposit size, grade, economic viability, reserves, or the probability of a commercial discovery.

What “evidence fusion” means

Evidence fusion means the layer combines several independent signals into one screening surface, instead of relying on a single map. GeaSpirit learns, from 166k known mines, how strongly each control predicts mineralisation, then fuses them.

Illustrative interpretation

Oil & Gas — in depth

Two layers carry hydrocarbons, at two different scales, and the difference between them is the single most important thing on this page. A petroleum province is a basin-scale assessment domain. An oil or gas field is one accumulation. Reading one as the other is how a map that says “this region was studied” gets mistaken for a map that says “something was found here”.

Province is not field

A province can span a thousand kilometres and contain many petroleum systems and hundreds of fields; the USGS defined 1,023 of them and formally assessed 121. A field is a single documented accumulation with a name, an operator and a licence. GeaSpirit carries 545 of those, from the only two national regulators that publish at field level under terms permitting redistribution. Nothing in the province layer marks a discovery, and nothing in the field layer describes a basin.

Documented, and modelled — not the same claim

A single province popup mixes two kinds of statement, and they are tagged so they cannot be read alike. Documented is what the assessment recorded as already found by its date. Assessed / modelled is a statistical estimate of what had not been found yet. One is a record; the other is a projection, and no amount of confidence in the source turns the second into the first.

The units, and the mistake they caused

The assessment publishes in millions and billions, not billions and trillions, and the two are a thousand apart. GeaSpirit briefly displayed the raw numbers under converted labels, so West Siberia appeared to hold 1,270,049 TCF of gas — roughly two hundred times the proved reserves of the entire planet — and it read as a fact because it had a source line under it. The store now keeps the raw value under a key that names the raw unit, and the popup divides and says which number it is showing.

• MMBO — million barrels of oil. 139,913 MMBO = 139.913 BBO.
• BCFG — billion cubic feet of gas. 1,270,049 BCFG = 1,270.049 TCF.
• MMBOE — million barrels of oil equivalent. 182,864 MMBOE = 182.864 BBOE.

Assessment vintage: 2000

Almost every number in the province layer comes from the USGS World Petroleum Assessment of 2000. Known means cumulative production plus remaining reserves at that date — not current reserves, not today’s production. Mean undiscovered technically recoverable petroleum means the assessment’s central estimate of conventional petroleum that had not been found and that its assumptions judged recoverable with applicable technology. It is not a proved reserve, not a discovered resource, and says nothing whatever about economics. Technically recoverable and economically recoverable are different questions, and only the first is answered here.

Three provinces, read properly

Half of this map is exploration history

This is the sharpest bias on the site and both layers carry it. The province map shows where petroleum was looked for and found, which makes it a map of commercial drilling history as much as of geology. The field map is worse: essentially all of it is the North Sea, because that is where two governments publish field data anyone may redistribute — not where the world’s oil is. Dense petroleum data does not mean better geology, and a blank region means an absent dataset, never absent geology and never absent hydrocarbons.

Produced and formation waters

Some formation and produced waters carry lithium, bromine, iodine, boron or strontium, and that is genuinely interesting. It is also the point where a screening platform most easily starts inventing deposits, so the chain is stated rather than skipped: an element being present is not a concentration; a concentration is not a resource; a resource is not recoverable; and recoverable is not economic. GeaSpirit does not present brines as a mining opportunity without evidence specific to that brine.

What is public, and what is not

Public: province and field identity, country, basin, hydrocarbon type, status, the regulators’ published attributes, the historical assessment metrics, and the source and licence of each. Private, where it is held at all: well-level data, formation tops, wireline logs, core descriptions, pressure, temperature, fluid and produced-water chemistry, seismic interpretation, reservoir geometry and basin models. A dataset being ingested is not a reason to publish it, and the licence it arrived under decides that, not us.

What these layers cannot do

A 2000 assessment vintage. Uneven global exploration and a heavy commercial bias. Province-level generalisation where field-level detail would be better. Field coverage that is national, not global, and will stay that way until more regulators publish under terms permitting reuse. Differing national reporting standards. Proprietary subsurface datasets excluded on purpose. And estimates that were made under technical and economic assumptions which have moved since — a resource estimate is not a reserve, and neither is a promise.

Source and provenance

Provinces: USGS, Geologic Provinces of the World, 2000 World Petroleum Assessment — a work of the United States Government, public domain. Fields: Norway’s Sokkeldirektoratet under the Norwegian Licence for Open Government Data, and the United Kingdom’s North Sea Transition Authority under its Open User Licence. Licensed commercial datasets — S&P, Wood Mackenzie, Rystad — are not used and are not redistributed. Every attribute traces to the regulator that published it.

One layer is never the whole answer

A strong signal in a single layer should normally be checked against independent evidence before you draw any conclusion. GeaSpirit is designed to be read in combination.

Prospectivity + Geology + Geophysics + Mineral occurrences + Historical mining → better context

Every layer, explained

From map layers to Evidence Compass

Map layers let you explore individual evidence sources visually. Evidence Compass is GeaSpirit's private decision-support architecture that evaluates multiple evidence families together, separates Priority from Confidence, weighs counter-evidence, and suggests where further investigation may be justified.

From maps to decisions

How GeaSpirit turns geospatial evidence into an auditable investigation pathway. The layers above tell you where to look. What follows is what happens after that, and it is three tools and one habit: replace inference with evidence, and say which of the two you are holding.

Mineral Prospectivity → Tailings Intelligence → Evidence Compass → Evidence Passport → Next Best Test

Not every asset travels the whole path, and most stop early. That is the point of having a path: it costs almost nothing to stop something at the first step and a great deal to stop it at the last.

POSSIBLE → SUPPORTED → MEASURED → QUANTIFIED → TESTED FOR RECOVERY

Almost everything in the world sits on the first two rungs. Very little reaches the fourth. Nothing reaches the fifth without physical laboratory work, which no amount of data can substitute for.

Three tools, one system

Residual Resource Intelligence and Next Best Test are engines the system uses, not further products competing with these three.

Negative results are results

When a hypothesis fails, what was expected, what was tested and why it was rejected are kept. Over years that record becomes something that cannot easily be bought: a systematic account of which kinds of opportunity look attractive and routinely fail, and for what reason. A failed hypothesis is evidence, not something to hide.

Prediction first, measurement later

A result is worth far more when it was written down before the measurement existed. GeaSpirit's blind validation set was sealed once and opened once, and when the underlying engine later changed, the result was retired to history rather than quietly re-run — because a benchmark you can repeat until it agrees with you is not a benchmark. The same discipline is what future asset-level predictions are built to follow: state the expected signal, the evidence behind it, and the criteria that would confirm or reject it — and only then go and measure.

What can be done from a desk, and what cannot

Remotely: global screening, data integration, reconciling a waste facility with the mine that produced it, geological and mineralogical interpretation, integrating published chemistry, assessing quantity, finding the gaps, prioritising candidates and defining the next test. That is most of the thinking, and it is why a small team can cover the world before owning a single instrument.

What cannot be done from a desk: taking a representative sample; measuring chemistry that has never been analysed; determining true recoverability without metallurgical testing; and proving a resource or reserve. Those need field geologists, accredited laboratories, mineralogical and metallurgical work, and engineering. GeaSpirit can specify and interpret that work. It cannot replace it.

Words that are not synonyms

The screening results, priority rankings, candidate lists and the reasoning behind each recommendation are part of the authenticated console. This page explains what the system does; it does not publish what it concludes.