Gravity Survey Companies in Pakistan: How to Choose the Right Provider

Pick your gravity survey provider on three things: the gravimeter they use, how they handle corrections, and whether they hand you processed data you can actually act on. Not the lowest quote. Not the prettiest website. Those three technical items decide whether your survey finds a buried orebody or just burns your budget.

Here's the problem. There's no public, certified list of gravity survey companies in Pakistan. So you're mostly going off referrals, old contacts, and whatever a university geophysics department recommends. That makes vetting on your own harder than it should be — which is exactly why you need to know what to ask.

Let me walk you through it.

What does a gravity survey company actually deliver?

A gravity survey measures tiny variations in the Earth's gravitational field. Dense rock (like a sulphide-rich orebody or a chromite body) pulls a little harder. Less dense ground (a fault, a void, sediment) pulls a little less. Map those differences across your lease and you get a picture of what's under the surface without drilling blind.

But raw readings mean nothing on their own.

The value is in the corrections and the final product. A competent provider should give you:

• Station data with GPS coordinates and precise elevations
• Bouguer anomaly maps (the corrected, interpretable version)
• Residual and regional separation (so local targets stand out from deep basin effects)
• A short interpretation report tied to your actual geology

If a company just hands you a spreadsheet of readings and calls it done, you've been shortchanged. The processing is the job.

The questions that separate real gravity survey companies from the rest

Ask these before you sign anything. Vague answers are the answer.

What gravimeter do you use, and when was it last calibrated? The instrument matters. LaCoste & Romberg and Scintrex CG-series meters are common workhorses in exploration. The brand matters less than the calibration — an uncalibrated meter gives you confidently wrong numbers.

How do you handle drift and tides? Gravimeters drift over the course of a day, and the Earth's tides shift gravity measurably. Good crews re-occupy a base station regularly to correct drift. If they don't mention base-station loops, walk.

How are you getting elevations? This is where surveys quietly fail in Pakistan. Elevation error translates directly into anomaly error (the free-air correction is roughly 0.3086 mGal per metre — so a one-metre elevation mistake can hide or fake a target). In the terrain of Gilgit Baltistan or Balochistan, you need differential GPS or proper levelling, not a handheld unit.

What terrain correction will you apply? In flat Punjab farmland, terrain correction is minor. In mountains, it's everything. A nearby ridge or valley distorts your readings, and ignoring that in steep ground makes the whole map useless.

What station spacing are you proposing and why? Tighter spacing finds smaller targets but costs more. The spacing should match your target size and your stage. Early reconnaissance over a big lease is wide. Honing in on a drill target is tight. If they quote one spacing for every job, they're not thinking.

Can I see a sample deliverable from a past project? Redacted is fine. You want to see that they produce real Bouguer maps and written interpretation, not just data dumps.

What a gravity survey in Pakistan actually costs (and why nobody can quote you blind)

I won't give you a per-kilometre price, because anyone who does without seeing your site is guessing. Cost depends on terrain, access, station count, spacing, and how remote you are. A survey in accessible Sindh desert and a survey on a GB slope at 3,000 metres are not the same job — not even close.

What drives your bill:

To get a real number, send any provider your lease boundary (a KML or shapefile), your target mineral, and what stage you're at. Then compare quotes line by line — not just the total. One cheap quote that skips terrain correction isn't cheaper. It's worthless.

Common mistakes mine owners make when they hire a gravity survey

Honestly, the biggest one is buying a survey too early. If you haven't even looked at your lease with satellite data yet, you're paying for a crew to walk ground you could have screened from a desk first.

That's the gap we built GeoMine AI to fill. We use Sentinel-2, ASTER, SAR, and SRTM DEM data with AI to generate geological reports and mineral prospectivity maps — so you know where to focus before you spend on a field gravity crew. Think of it as deciding where the survey goes. The gravity work then confirms and refines what the satellite data flagged.

Other mistakes I see:

• Hiring on price alone, then discovering the data can't be interpreted
• No clear ownership of the processed data in the contract (get it in writing — the data is yours)
• Skipping the interpretation report and trying to read raw maps yourself
• Surveying at the wrong spacing for the question you're asking
• Ignoring elevation accuracy in mountain terrain, which quietly ruins the result

And a trade-off worth saying out loud: gravity isn't always the right first tool. For some targets, magnetics or a quick satellite screen tells you more for less. A good provider will tell you when gravity is premature. A bad one sells you the survey regardless.

Your next step

Before you contact any gravity survey companies in Pakistan, get your lease screened from satellite data first — it tells you whether a ground survey is even worth commissioning yet, and where it should go. Send us your lease boundary and target mineral at https://geomines.org and we'll generate a geological report so your field spend goes where the data actually points. Then take those focus areas to a survey crew and ask them the six questions above.