Geoscience Australia's contribution to Australian mineral exploration

Since 1946 Geoscience Australia has been providing pre-competitive (non-rivalous) data and information to the minerals and petroleum exploration industries which has played an important part in resource discovery, including the Olympic Dam and Lihir deposits, and the Browse Basin hydrocarbon field. The modest investment in precompetitive data has resulted in economic benefits to Australia orders of magnitude greater than cost. Australia is currently seen by industry as a mature exploration destination as most of the exposed regions have been extensively explored. However, Australia has large areas of basement covered by younger sedimentary rocks and regolith, which is both an opportunity and a challenge. To address this challenge, Geoscience Australia has begun a data collection program aimed at determining what data are required to explore undercover and providing that data in northern Australia. Data acquisition will include a range of non-traditional geophysical and geochemical methods and the data will be used to assess mineral potential on regional and national scales. In the future, Geoscience will extend this data coverage into southern Australia and develop methods of assessing the viability of resource development in remote Australia. Presented at the 14th Biennial Meeting of the Society for Geology Applied to Mineral Deposits (SGA) Quebec 2017