During my
$ARIC.V site visit in Côte d'Ivoire last year, the ground crew took me along for a field day where we went sampling termite mounts!
West Africa has a lot of ground where the soil they sample is basically a weathered, transported mess.
One workaround is to let termites do the digging.
Their mounds are built from subsurface material they bring up, so sampling termitaria can act like a cheap, wide-area screen for buried geochemical signals.
However, even when used properly, termite mound geochemistry is target generation, not discovery.
You sample mounds on a grid, analyze for Au and pathfinders, then integrate that with structure, lithology, and geophysics to vector where the next holes should go.
In certain regolith settings, studies show mound material can reflect underlying mineralization better than surrounding soils, which is kinda the whole point.
Anyway, here's part of that field day with
@AwaleResources.
(full 2-hour site visit vid is linked in the quoted post)