The Delamerian basement to the Murray Basin has been selected as the focus region for a major Geological Survey of South Australia project being conducted as part of the MinEx CRC National Drilling Initiative...
The Delamerian basement to the Murray Basin has been selected as the focus region for a major Geological Survey of South Australia project being conducted as part of the MinEx CRC National Drilling Initiative https://minexcrc.com.au/program-three-national-drilling-initiative/. This region of South Australia is currently under-explored, primarily due to a lack of geological data and a poor understanding of the nature of the basement rocks concealed beneath the Cenozoic Murray Basin. The objective of the Delamerian Basement to the Murray Basin Project is to stimulate mineral exploration beneath cover of the Murray Basin by providing industry with new data and new constraints on the geological framework and mineral prospectivity in this greenfields region (Curtis and Wise, 2019). The project will include a drilling program partnered with MinEx CRC, which will provide valuable information in this region where there are few existing basement-penetrating drill holes. In July 2019, the Geological Survey took out a Section 15 [which defines a temporary preclusion of prospecting and commercial activities under the provisions of the SA Mining Act] over the Murray Basin region (F2014/00363-9) in order to conduct a regional-scale data review and analysis, prior to selecting the locations for performing the drilling program. Two drilling regions have been selected: Quondong Vale in the northern Murray Basin and Alawoona in the central Murray Basin. These regions will be retained under a Section 15 Gazettal for the duration of the drilling program, and the remaining ground will be released for exploration on 1st September 2020. This Atlas provides a pictorial summary of some of the geological and exploration data available for the Murray Basin region, including land access, current and previous exploration, mineral deposits and occurrences, surface and basement geology, geophysics, and drill hole and rock sample geochemistry. Most of these pages are derived from datasets available on SARIG https://map.sarig.sa.gov.au/, and the Atlas presents a snapshot of the data current as of August 2020. An extensive review of legacy open file exploration data that had previously been acquired over the project region was conducted by the GSSA during the period July 2019–August 2020, focussing on drill holes, lithology logs and surface and downhole geochemistry. A significant proportion of legacy data that was not previously in the GSSA database (accessible via SARIG) has lately been uploaded, including 14,930 drill holes corresponding to 515,757 metres of drilling, 9921 new lithology logs, corresponding to 270,094 metres of logging, 59,696 surface geochemistry samples and 152,822 drill hole geochemistry samples. This data upload represents a 72% increase in the available drill holes over the project region, a 110% increase in lithology logs, a 284% increase in surface geochemistry samples and a 188% increase in drill hole geochemistry samples.
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