The predominant geologic context of Nappes zone of northern Tunisia is favorable to host Pb-Zn and Fe mineralization. Particularly, the most conspicuous reddish color soil, revealed the tremendous amount of iron oxide minerals around Fe Tamera mining site as well as Sidi Driss site, which are both located in the Nefza district, in northern Tunisia. Reflectance spectroscopy is an alternative approach to traditional discrimination soil’s technique that use absorption features between visible (VIS) and Short-wave (SWIR) wavelengths (350-2500nm) to discriminate the soil mineralogical composition. The analysis of the spectral behavior which is quantified according to the ratio between reflected energy and incident energy on a defined target is applied at the surface of soils. All collected soil samples were located using a Global Positionning System GPS and analyzed with X-Ray Diffraction XRD method. In this study a procedure is proposed for determining the quantitative estimation of oxides/hydroxides within soils based on XRD results. Moreover the discrimination of iron oxide and iron sulfate minerals (hematite, goethite and jarosite respectively) even clay minerals was verified by ground-based spectroradiometer measurements.
|