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As reported by CNR News, Dongjing Guizhou and others:

The work won one of Guizhou's Top Ten Scientific and Technological Innovation Achievements of 2022, and was selected as a major technology transfer project to be rolled out across the province.

Since 2018, Zhou Qi's team at the Guizhou Bureau of Geology and Mineral Exploration has refined its original theory of manganese deposits formed by gas-liquid exhalative sedimentation, and proposed that such deposits should have an ore-conducting structure at depth: a channel that carried the manganese up. "To test this, Zhou Qi's team worked with Professor Wu Chonglong of China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), whose group leads the field in China. Big-data 3D geological modelling showed that the large and super-large deposits of eastern Guizhou are controlled not only by the roughly east-west Nanhua rift but also by an older north-west Tongren rift. If a deep manganese channel exists, it should lie where the two structures meet."

Building on this theory, the team fused manganese prospecting with big data and built a 3D solid mineral digital exploration information system with fully independent intellectual property, leading China's move to digital mineral exploration and enabling prediction and efficient exploration of concealed super-large exhalative manganese deposits. Through this work the team discovered and reported four world-class super-large manganese deposits and Asia's largest high-grade manganese deposit in eastern Guizhou. Eastern Guizhou now holds about a third of the world's super-large manganese deposits, changing their global distribution and creating China's largest, and only, world-class manganese resource base.