Determining regional stratigraphy and potential gold host rocks in poorly exposed Palaeoproterozoic metasedimentary rocks of the Tanami region, northern Australia

Lex Lambeck
Geoscience Australia

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Introduction

The Tanami region is northern Australia's largest Palaeoproterozoic gold province. It includes significant gold deposits at Callie, Titania, Groundrush, and Coyote, but outcrop is poor. Mineral exploration in areas of poor outcrop is expensive and carries substantial risks, so a new lithological fingerprinting technique has been developed by Geoscience Australia. Regional geochemical sampling and U-Pb detrital zircon age spectra have been used to develop an evolutionary model for sediment deposition in the Tanami basin. This basin model is an important tool for understanding and testing the regional stratigraphy and predicting the distribution of the units most likely to host epigenetic gold.

Relationships between rare earth elements (REE), high field strength elements, Sm-Nd isotopes, and detrital zircon populations enable the fingerprinting and identification of the provenance of siliciclastic sedimentary rocks within the fine-grained Palaeoproterozoic Tanami stratigraphy (Table 1). Samples for down-hole geochemistry were collected from regional diamond drill cores (Newmont and Tanami Gold) in the Bald Hill Sequence, Tanami Group, (including the Dead Bullock and Killi Killi Formations), and Mt Charles Formation. Representative samples of outcrop taken from the Ware Group, and Pargee Formation, (geochemical data for the latter are limited).

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Evolution and metallogenesis of the North Australian Craton Conference Abstracts