Geographical environment determinism for discovery of mineral deposits

• Geographical environments control the regional discovery frequency of deposits.
• Geographical environments impact on the coverage and intensity of explorations.
• Number of discovered deposits - exploration level relation described by a power law.
• Number of potentially undiscovered mineral deposits estimated.

The spatial distribution of metallic mineral deposits discovered in China during 1901 to 2007 shows that nearly 85% of the total 2906 metallic mineral deposits with the magnitude greater than medium-size are located on the southeastern side of the famous Heihe-Tengchong “geo-demographic demarcation line”. This spatial pattern is consistent with the population distribution of China, indicating that the spatial distribution of discovered mineral deposits may be related to exploration level that is strongly restricted by the geographic environments. We found that the number of discovered deposits per unit area in explored regions increases with the exploration level, following a power-law model. From this model, if the geological, geochemical and geophysical exploration in the NW region of the geo-demographic demarcation line reaches the same level as that in the SE region of the line, about 2000 metallic mineral deposits with magnitudes greater than medium-size remain to be discovered in the NW region of China.