Mineral systems and tectonic evolution of the North Australian Craton

David L. Huston
Geoscience Australia

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Introduction

The North Australian Craton, which stretches from the Kimberley Craton, in the west, to the Mt Isa Inlier, in the east, and from the Pine Creek Orogen, in the north, to the Warumpi Province in the south, began in the late Archaean and continued through much of the Palaeoproterozoic, terminating at about 1635 Ma with accretion of the Warumpi Province during the Leibig Orogeny (Close et al., 2006). The growth of this craton was accompanied by mineral systems that produced world class lode gold (Callie), Zn-Pb-Ag (Mt Isa-type-MIT: Mt Isa, Hilton, HYC and Century; and Broken Hill-type-BHT: Cannington), unconformity U (Jabiluka), and iron oxide-copper-gold (IOCG: Ernest Henry) as well as smaller, but still economic, magmatic-related W-Mo and Sn-Ta deposits, and uneconomic volcanic-hosted massive sulphides (VHMS) and layered mafic intrusion-related Ni-Cu-PGE deposits. Over the past fifteen years workers at Geoscience Australia, the Northern Territory Geological Survey, and the Geological Survey of Western Australia have established temporally constrained geological and tectonic frameworks for the constituent parts of the North Australia Craton, into which, mineral systems can be placed. Although some of the frameworks presented here are well established, others are speculative and are presented to assess potential implications to the evolution of the North Australian Craton.

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Related links

Evolution and metallogenesis of the North Australian Craton Conference Abstracts