Mapping Hydrothermal Alteration Zones and Structural Features in Allawi and Hangaliya Areas, South-Central Eastern Desert of Egypt: Prospecting Gold Mineralization Using ASTER and PALSAR Satellite Imagery

Kassem, Osama M. K. , Nabawy, Bassem S. , Bilal, Zeinab L. , Abdelhameed, Mohammed

2026-02-01 JOURNAL OF THE INDIAN SOCIETY OF REMOTE SENSING 2026   54(卷), 2(期), (671-690页)

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The Allawi and Hangaliya areas are the most vital regions that lie a few kilometers from the most recent and famous Sukary gold mine. These areas encompass the most source rock units for mineralized gold deposits to be occurring as well as provide complex structural features associated with transpression and NW-sinistral shearing of the Najd fault corridor. The current study employs fieldwork, structural analysis, and remotely sensed data to distinguish between various types of rocks and identify the structural elements and delineation zones of hydrothermal alteration associated with gold mineralization in the south-central Eastern Desert of Egypt. ASTER data was worked with using image processing methods like FCC, BR, DS, PCA, and MNF. These algorithms helped identify lithological groups by giving results that were complementary to each other. Based on the spectral characteristics of rock-forming minerals, the RGB ASTER images of FCC (8, 4, 2), BR (9/8, 3/6, 1/4; 4/6, 2/6, 4/7 and 2/1, 8/1, 8/5), DS (8, 5, 4), PCA (4, 2, 3), and MNF (3, 1, 2) are very effective and successfully differentiate serpentinized ultramafics, metagabbros, metavolcanics (basic and intermediated), metadiorites, hornblende-biotite schists, leucogranites, and metapsammitic gneiss. Using PCA and filtering, we got the lineaments and spatial density in the areas we studied from the PALSAR data. The dominantly NW to NNW and subsequent N-S trends of structural lineaments are related to the sinistral shear corridor of the Najd system. Our results show that alteration zones of argillic, phyllic, and propylitic could be associated with prospecting gold mineralization using the mineral indices, relative absorption band depths, and the constrained energy minimization (CEM) method on ASTER data. The most of these altered minerals were in conjunction with zones of high to moderate lineament densities. Therefore, we suggest five favorable sites of alteration minerals (3 sites in the Allawi area and 2 sites in the Hangaliya area) that could be associated with the prospecting gold deposits.