Company Overview
Equinox Gold is a gold-focused mining company with operating and development assets across the Americas. In Canada, its Valentine Gold Mine in central Newfoundland and Labrador has entered production and, when operating at capacity, is expected to be the largest gold mine in Atlantic Canada.
This use case highlights how the Equinox Gold exploration team utilized DORA, VRIFY’s AI-assisted geoscience software for target generation and prospectivity analysis, to support a systematic review of exploration potential across its broader Valentine land position.
The Why
Exploration at Valentine has historically been concentrated along the Valentine Lake Shear Zone, the primary structural corridor hosting the project’s known gold deposits. This focus aligned with earlier project objectives, which centred on resource definition and advancing the deposits toward development and production.
As a result, exploration across the broader land package — away from the established shear zone — is more limited. In addition, regional geology in this part of the belt had traditionally been viewed through a base-metal exploration lens, with little consideration historically for potential gold mineralization.
With the project advancing into production, and supported by a broader exploration mandate, Equinox Gold began to revisit opportunities outside the shear zone. The goal was to reexamine underexplored areas more systematically by integrating large volumes of existing data within a consistent framework that would enable their geoscience team to refine targeting priorities across the Valentine property. DORA was introduced to support this shift in exploration focus and to allow iterative testing of exploration hypotheses.
The Process
Geoscientists at Equinox Gold first used DORA to model the Valentine property from the available datasets. DORA’s model included a map showing the likelihood of mineralization through the VRIFY Prospectivity Score (VPS), with higher values corresponding to greater mineral potential, along with model-performance metrics and insight into the relative influence of each individual data layer on prediction outcomes. The results confirmed that the model represented the deposits in the known main mineralized zone — the Valentine Lake Shear Zone — as high-prospectivity results. With this validation in place, they then focused their attention on areas outside the main mineralized trend, enabling evaluation in direct comparison with known mineralization.
DORA modelling was conducted using models pretrained on all VRIFY’s data related to orogenic gold. The initial experiments and predictions were done in collaboration with VRIFY. Equinox Gold’s team then continued to refine inputs and parameters, iteratively testing geological hypotheses to assess the stability of prospectivity signals across areas beyond the established deposit trend.
A key aspect of the workflow was integrating property-scale magnetic and Very-Low-Frequency (VLF) electromagnetic datasets with public-domain magnetic data to expand data coverage. Strikefield layers generated using DORA’s Data Augmentation processes were also included to strengthen structural interpretation and target definition.
Following the initial prospectivity modelling conducted in June 2024, Equinox Gold’s exploration team incorporated newly available till-indicator mineral data to further define the footprints of the high-priority targets across the property.
The Outcome
The resulting prospectivity outputs from DORA led to a re-ranking of regional exploration priorities and identified areas of interest beyond the Valentine Lake Shear Zone. While some of these areas had been considered conceptually in the past, their alignment with DORA’s modelling results supported further evaluation within Equinox Gold’s exploration planning.
Notably, acting on insights from DORA, Equinox Gold made a new gold discovery, the Minotaur Zone, approximately 8km northwest of the Valentine Lake Mill, announced on February 2, 2026. Earlier grab samples returned grades of up to 7 g/t Au in the area. The Minotaur Zone’s priority status as an exploration target was strengthened significantly when DORA ranked it highly for mineral potential. This assessment was based on the VPS, derived from iterative analysis of integrated data layers including geochemistry, geophysics, drill results, and structural geology. This result prompted a targeted reexamination of the area, leading to the discovery of visible gold in grab samples grading as high as 650 g/t Au. The AI-assisted follow-up work provided Equinox Gold’s geoscience team sufficient confidence to proceed with a drill program that ultimately confirmed the presence of a high-grade, continuous gold system. Initial drilling, including intercepts of 2.68g/t Au over 32m from 93m to 125m (MT-25-011) and 1.78g/t Au over 39m from 217m to 256m (MT-25-024), identified competency contrasts and structural controls comparable to those observed along the Valentine Lake Shear Zone. The Minotaur Zone represents the first major discovery outside the primary structural corridor hosting known gold deposits on the Valentine property, demonstrating broader regional potential with implications for mine-life extension. Building on this AI-assisted exploration success, which illustrates DORA’s effectiveness in identifying high-potential mineral targets and strengthening confidence in existing field evidence, Equinox Gold is advancing a 15,000-20,000m drill program on the Minotaur Zone in 2026 as part of a systematic effort to expand the exploration footprint across the land package.
"VRIFY’s DORA software has allowed us to validate known mineralization and then confidently extend prospectivity analysis into underexplored areas of the Valentine land package. The ability to incorporate public-domain geophysical data alongside our project data helped generate regional insights and inform new exploration activities including prioritizing key areas for follow-up work."
Nic Capps, VP Exploration, Equinox Gold
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To learn more about DORA and VRIFY’s broader suite of tools for exploration analysis and effective communication with stakeholders, book a demo with our Geoscience Team.
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