WHO ARE WE
"We're passionate about mineral spectra"
HHGeoscience principal Jon Huntington is an internationally recognised geologist with a career’s worth of deep experience in the hyperspectral characterisation of rocks from the laboratory, field, airborne and spaceborne sensors.
He has worked as an exploration and mine geologist, in applied research for Australia’s CSIRO, consulted widely to international companies, and led many applied industry-funded remote sensing research projects through AMIRA International and MERIWA (MRIWA).
In addition Jon has been instrumental in the co-development of:
- The Hylogging Concept
- The Spectral Geologist (TSG) software package, and
- The AuScope National Virtual Core Library (NVCL)
Dr. Jon Huntington PhD FTSE
Director, Huntington Hyperspectal
Background:
During the 1970’s with long-time colleague Andy Green and others Jon worked on developing uses for the early Landsat series satellites for mineral exploration and geological mapping. This was a period of strong industry support for their research funded by numerous mining companies under the auspices of AMIRA International. This also involved a decade of training workshops through the Australian Mineral Foundation (AMF) in Adelaide.
In the early 1980s Jon pioneered with others the first airborne hyperspectral surveys in Australia demonstrating that one could identify mineralogical signatures from 10,000 feet, then in the early 1990’s with Dr Terry Cocks he was involved in the early use of the PIMA, the shoe-box sized field-portable spectrometer and in the mid 90’s with Peter Mason and Sasha Pontual the predecessor of what became the TSG software package that is still in use and expanding today.
In the mid 1990’s with colleagues Ken McCracken and Andy Green he was awarded the Australia Prize for Science for their early work in geology image processing and utilisation and shortly after that Jon pioneered the ARIES hyperspectral satellite concept, that to this day has not seen the availability of anything equal in global sensing capability.
In the early 2000s Jon transitioned from remote sensing to proximal sensing and with CSIRO colleagues pioneered the use of hyperspectral sensing of diamond drill cores (HyLogging) to bring routine, industrial-scale, objective mineralogical interpretation to the mining sector. This allowed in the mid 2000’s the development of the federally-funded national infrastructure project, the AuScope National Virtual Core Library (NVCL), which is routinely used by all of Australia's State and Territory Geological Surveys. Jon regularly provides training in the use of data from the NVCL and the HyLogging Systems with the TSG-Core software.
His remaining goal is to expand the use of hyperspectral sensing to petrological scales of geological investigation to augment the capabilities of the other scales of drill core, field, airborne and satellite hyperspectral sensing.
Jon is a Fellow of the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (FTSE) and a CSIRO Honorary Fellow.