From Geoscience Australia
JSON format icon JSON RDF format icon RDF ISO19115-3 XML

Evaporites in Australia

Created 17/10/2025

Updated 17/10/2025

JSON format icon JSON RDF format icon RDF ISO19115-3 XML

Thin surface accumulations of salt in playa lakes have been known since the early exploration of Australia. However, surface occurrences of bedded evaporites, exposed in some sedimentary basins by erosion of the sedimentary sequence, have been discovered only recently, as a result of regional geological mapping, and it is only in the last two decades that substantial amounts of subsurface evaporites have been located, in the course of drilling for petroleum. Forty-two petroleum and exploration wells have intersected evaporite beds (Fig. 1), but although evaporites can be important in some structures as cap rocks for hydrocarbon accumulations, there has been little incentive for the oil exploration companies to continuously core the evaporite sequences. In most well sections there are only one or two cores in any evaporite sequence, and in some wells no cores were attempted in what were undoubtedly thick evaporites. As a result, some of the more important details of depositional history are missing. It is, however, unlikely that significant beds of potassium-rich minerals have been overlooked, as they would be recorded on gammaray logs. The known number of wells that have been drilled specifically to test or explore for evaporite deposits includes seven drilled by the Bureau of Mineral Resources, and seven by exploration companies and the South Australia Department of Mines and Energy. In Australia, evaporites formed chiefly in the late Precambrian, Silurian, and Devonian, and are widespread in the subsurface of sedimentary basins. The largest deposits, volumetrically, are distributed between 18° and 20° south.

Files and APIs

Tags

Additional Info

Field Value
Title Evaporites in Australia
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/7575c219-09bf-4446-ae6d-4277a0acec1d
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period 22/04/2018
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
{
  "coordinates": [
    [
      [
        112.0,
        -44.0
      ],
      [
        155.0,
        -44.0
      ],
      [
        155.0,
        -10.0
      ],
      [
        112.0,
        -10.0
      ],
      [
        112.0,
        -44.0
      ]
    ]
  ],
  "type": "Polygon"
}
Data Portal Geoscience Australia

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Geoscience Australia "Evaporites in Australia". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/evaporites-in-australia1