The Woomera Prohibited Area (WPA) is a military testing range covering ~127,000 square km of the land surface of central South Australia. Underlying it are highly prospective rocks of the Gawler Craton, a major province of the earth's crust which...
The Woomera Prohibited Area (WPA) is a military testing range covering ~127,000 square km of the land surface of central South Australia. Underlying it are highly prospective rocks of the Gawler Craton, a major province of the earth's crust which hosts the world-class Olympic Dam deposit and major mines such as Prominent Hill and Challenger. The atlas published herein is a collation of mineral exploration information relevant to this geologically important region within South Australia. It displays the extensive range of data resources originating from within the WPA that were available at the time of compilation (November 2013), providing readers with a visual reference to the data which is freely available on SARIG, South Australia’s online geoserver. The WPA has the potential to contain multiple mineral resource commodities and deposit styles, but the most economically significant of these are 1) iron oxide - associated copper-gold±uranium (IOCG±U) type deposits; 2) globally unusual gold only deposits of the Challenger type; 3) sediment-hosted uranium deposits within sandstones, and 4) unconformity-style uranium deposits. Examples of the first two are known to occur within the WPA, and evidence exists that the potential for finding deposits of the latter two styles is significant. The atlas also presents information pertaining to land access and administration, including maps about military testing range zones of the WPA, actively explored areas, pastoral landholdings, and native title claims/determinations. A wealth of geological and geophysical data derived from the WPA are portrayed, from surface to basement geological maps, to state geophysical imagery and derivatives. Coverage of non-potential field data is provided, as well as value-added products, such as the SEEBASE™ Depth to Basement map. A suite of ASTER-derived surficial mineral distribution maps are contained in the atlas. Note that when interpreting the ASTER mineral maps, information pertaining to the numerical thresholds of the colour stretch should be consulted and can be found in the metadata document for each mineral theme. Metadata is available to download from SARIG. A vast array of documented historic exploration data obtained by work done across the WPA is available for review through SARIG, accessible by text searching under the Publications and Reports section of the Databases tab. As a way of briefly summarising the exploration history, maps depicting expired/surrendered exploration licences have been compiled to create a spatial representation of exploration by commodity, thus providing insights into the temporal development of mineral exploration for the region.
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