Lead-zinc-silver metallogenic prediction based on GIS in Tuotuo River region，Qinghai，China

Tuotuo River region lies in one of the most important metallogenic belts in China—northwestern Sanjiang metallogenic belt. In this research，multi-source data sets including geological，geochemical，geophysical，and remotely sensed images were integrated for mineral potential analysis with GIS technology. Under the guidance of regional metallogenic features and deposit-forming geologic anomaly theories，evidential layers were obtained from these sets，which were combined to calculate weight for each layer and to identify the posterior probabilities for unit cells of the study area with Weights of Evidence module of the application MRAS. As the results, six level I，seven level II and nine level III lead-zinc-silver prospective belts were delineated with 83% of known mineral deposits among them. Because of the belts' similar metallogenic condition with known mineral deposits, they form the most promising zones for considerably attractive new occurrences of mineral deposits, deserving more and adequate attention in future exploration.