Three-dimensional morphological analysis method for geologic bodies and its parallel implementation

• A 3D morphological analysis method for general closed 2-manifold geologic bodies.
• Parallel algorithms that allows the morphological analysis to be more scalable.
• A case study discovering the association between geologic shape and mineralization.

It has been found that the spatial locations and distributions of orebodies, especially for certain hydrothermal mineral deposits, are closely related to the shape of intrusive geologic bodies. For complex and large-scale geologic bodies, however, it is challenging to achieve rigorous and quantitative morphological analysis by standard geological surface reconstruction and trend-surface analysis methods. This paper presents a novel, quantitative morphological analysis method for general geologic bodies of closed 2-manifold surface based on mathematical morphology. Through the processes of morphological filtering, set operations and three-dimensional Euclidean distance transform (3D-EDT), the global trend shape, local convex and concave zones as well as degree of surface undulation of a geologic body are extracted respectively. All of the three analysis phases are speeded up via parallel algorithms implemented by using the message passing interface (MPI) standard. The proposed method is tested with a case study of the Xinwuli intrusion with complex shape in Fenghuangshan deposit of the Tongling district, China. The results demonstrate that the method is an effective and efficient way to achieve quantitative morphological analysis, thereby decreasing the time necessary to find the association between morphological parameters of geologic bodies and mineralization.