Surface geometry inversion of geophysical data has recently been introduced as an effec-tive approach for generating surface-based geological models. The models obtainedthrough surface geometry inversion clearly delineate the contacts between distinct rockunits, making them easily interpretable by geologists. Surface geometry inversion hasshown promising preliminary results in other works, but the practical application of sur-face geometry inversion on real geophysical data has not been thoroughly investigated.To move towards a better understanding of the practicalities involved, we applied sur-face geometry inversion to a real magnetic dataset acquired over two kimberlite pipeslocated in north-central Botswana. The objective was to assess the effectiveness andlimitations of the surface geometry inversion approach in accurately characterizing thesubsurface geometry and identifying the boundaries of the kimberlite pipes. We firstperform an anomaly separation approach to isolate the magnetic anomalies associatedwith the kimberlite pipes. A surface geometry inversion algorithm was applied to theoriginal and separated datasets using various initial models and other control parame-ters. Several tests were performed to investigate the effects that data processing, initialmodels, and other parameter choices have on the surface geometry inversion results. Wesuccessfully recover the geometry, extension and dip of the two kimberlite pipes. Wediscuss the results of our various tests and provide advice for practitioners interested inapplying surface geometry inversion methods to their data. Our work indicates that sur-face geometry inversion can be used as a complementary approach to voxel inversion,and we propose an iterative surface geometry inversion algorithm as a possible alter-native approach to voxel inversion for simple geological scenarios. This work providesvaluable insights into the appropriate application of surface geometry inversion on realgeophysical datasets.

K e y w o r d s: Data processing, Inverse problem, Inversion, Magnetics

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