Exploring for the Future: South Nicholson Basin Region project outcomes and sequence stratigraphy

Exploring for the Future (EFTF) is a four year $100.5 million initiative by the Australian Government conducted in partnership with state and territory government agencies, Geoscience Australia, CSIRO, and universities. The EFTF initiative aims to boost northern Australia’s attractiveness as a destination for resource exploration investment. As part of this program, Geoscience Australia’s researchers have gathered, on an unprecedented scale, new pre-competitive data and information about the energy, mineral, and groundwater resource potential concealed beneath the surface in northern Australia. A major EFTF deliverable, the acquisition of crustal seismic reflection data in the region between the southern McArthur Basin and the Mount Isa western succession, crossing the South Nicholson Basin and Murphy Province, was completed in August 2017 (Figure 1). Prior to this survey, the region contained no seismic data, minimal well data and minor subsurface geological data (Carr et al 2016). Five seismic lines were acquired in an orientation to best image geological features as identified in outcrop, and subsurface geophysical anomalies as identified in gravity and magnetics data (Figure 1). The acquisition was designed to explore both exposed and undercover sedimentary basins to better understand the location and scale of the region’s potential resources and crustal architecture. The seismic program was undertaken in tandem with regional groundwater (Wallace et al 2018), surface geochemistry (Bastrakov et al 2018), and petroleum and mineral systems geochemistry (Jarrett et al 2018a; 2018a,b) studies. The primary aim of the survey was to investigate prominent areas with a low measured gravity response (‘gravity lows’) in the region to determine if they represent thick basin sequences similar to the nearby Beetaloo Sub‑basin, a highly prospective petroleum province (Cote et al 2018, Close et al 2016) . The gravity low that straddles the Northern Territory–Queensland border to the north of Camooweal (Figure 1), which is entirely overlain by the Georgina Basin, was a primary target of the survey. This new dataset has greatly improved our understanding of the geology and resources of the region. It was initially released in Alice Springs at the 2018 Annual Geoscience Exploration Seminar (Henson et al 2018). This paper provides an update of project results and presents an initial interpretation of the sequence stratigraphy.