This special publication is a compilation of papers presented at the Drift Exploration in Glaciated Terrain Short Course held in conjunction with the 19th International Geochemical Exploration Symposium in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in April, 1999. The short course was sponsored by the Association of Exploration Geochemists.

Numerical modeling is the process of obtaining approximate solutions to problems of scientific and/or engineering interest. The book series addresses novel mathematical and numerical techniques with an interdisciplinary emphasis that cuts across all fields of science, engineering and technology. It focuses on breakthrough research in a richly varied range of applications in physical, chemical, biological, geoscientific, medical and other fields in response to the explosively growing interest in numerical modeling in general and its expansion to ever more sophisticated physics. The goal of this series is to bridge the knowledge gap among engineers, scientists, and software developers trained in a variety of disciplines and to improve knowledge transfer among these groups involved in research, development and/or education. <...>

Many people and companies must be acknowledged for their assistance in the preparation of this book. Undoubtably, I will fail to mention all of them. To them 1 sincerely apologize for the oversight.

In various geosciences branches, including mineral exploration, geometallurgical characterization on established mining operations, and remote sensing, the regionalized input variables are spatially well-sampled across the domain of interest, limiting the scope of spatial uncertainty quantification procedures. In turn, response outcomes such as the mineral potential in a given region, mining throughput, metallurgical recovery, or in-situ estimations from remote satellite imagery, are usually modeled from a much-restricted subset of testing samples, collected at certain locations due to accessibility restrictions and the high acquisition costs.