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Detailed studies of the Mount Isa Inlier

Created 17/10/2025

Updated 17/10/2025

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The Proterozoic Mount Isa Inlier of northwestern Queensland is one of Australia's most important producers of copper, zinc, lead, and silver, accounting for over 40% of Australia's export earnings of these metals. Hence, it has been a focus of geological mapping and exploration for many years. BMR's interest began in the early 1950's, and by 1958 the entire inlier had been mapped at the broad reconnaissance level (1:250 000 scale) by joint BMR-GSQ (Geological Survey of Queensland) parties (Carter & others, 1961). This work established a stratigraphic framework for the inlier, and provided the first insight into its extremely complex structure. A more detailed (1:100 000 scale) second stage of mapping, again by joint BMRGSQ parties, began in 1969 and was largely completed by1980. This work extensively revised the stratigraphic picture, and the timing of major igneous events was determined using U-Pb geochronology. Blake (1987) synthesised the mapping results and prepared a 1:500 000 map of the entire inlier. The third BMR mapping stage began in 1983 and finished in 1989, and was concerned with detailed structural, penological (both igneous and metamorphic), sedimentological, and geochronological studies by BMR and BMR-supported university workers. The results of this work are presented as separate papers in this bulletin and as a set of individual geological maps at various scales on which most of the papers are based; the individual maps are synthesised into a 1:250 000 scale transect map which accompanies this bulletin. The maps are listed in the Table of Contents, and the locations of the mapped areas are shown in Figure 1. BMR is currently (1992) preparing a metallogenic analysis and Geographic Information System of the Mount Isa Inlier in ARC/INFO format (Wyborn & Gallagher, in preparation), which will incorporate the following digital datasets: the 1:500 000 scale geological map of Blake (1987); geochemical data; regional geophysical data; metallogenic data (Raymond & Fortowski, in press); and Landsat TM imagery.

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Additional Info

Field Value
Title Detailed studies of the Mount Isa Inlier
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/2a64169a-ec4c-4067-98c3-676d3ac675d0
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period 20/04/2018
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
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      ],
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      ]
    ]
  ],
  "type": "Polygon"
}
Data Portal Geoscience Australia

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Geoscience Australia "Detailed studies of the Mount Isa Inlier". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/detailed-studies-of-the-mount-isa-inlier