Geostatistics: A global vision I

Abstract

Introduction: The characterization of natural phenomena taking into account a limited number of data continues
being one of the most challenging problems for engineers nowadays. This is the case, for instance, of those
phenomena for which a law describing their manifestation is not known or the cost for obtaining the data is
high. These are the typical situations in geostatistics where the data is usually spatially distributed and is not
feasible to perform a significantly high number of measurements.
Objetive: Describe briefly the interpolation methods in geosciences, particularly, the Kriging which is widely
used to assess geostatistical data. This method takes into account the variability and spatial correlation of the
data for the statistical assessment of the unknown data.
Material and methods: For the introduction to Kriging technique, the example of a mineral deposit is shown.
Results: Kriging techniques are applied to a pyritic-polymethalic deposit. A brief summary of the most important
variants of the application of the method are shown
Conclusions: There are natural phenomena that take place basically in a plane so that its study only involves
two dimensions. This is the case of mineral deposits of small thickness. The example developed in this work
contributes to the teaching of Kriging technique in the geostatistic framework for students and specialists of
Earth Sciences.