Projects
Completed 2017 Coompana Drilling Program
The Coompana Province, located between the Gawler Craton to the east, the Musgrave Province to the north and the Madura Province to the west, straddles the South Australian-Western Australian border along Australia's southern coastline. The basement geology and mineral prospectivity of this vast region is poorly understood because there are no known rock exposures due to extensive Neoproterozoic to Cenozoic cover sediments of the Officer, Denman, Bight and Eucla basins. Very little exploration drilling to test the hidden basement rocks of this region has ever been undertaken.
A location map showing eight completed drill holes in the Coompana province of South Australia.
Drill targets were carefully designed to test various geophysical domains interpreted from recently acquired Coompana Magnetic and Radiometric Survey and the PACE Copper Coompana Gravity Survey.
Geoscience Australia undertook a mixture of pre-drilling geophysical surveys, including magnetotelluric, seismic reflection and passive seismic at historical to help identify the drill targets. The geophysical surveys characterised the thickness and nature of cover at each drill site to assist with drill program planning.
The geoscientific research drilling was successfully completed at 8 drill sites in 2017. More than 1,500 m of new oriented HQ3 diamond core samples of the Coompana crystalline basement were collected. Downhole gamma and temperature logs were acquired in each of the drill holes to constrain the stratigraphy of the cover units and thermal structure of the Coompana basement rocks.
The Geological Survey of South Australia (GSSA), Department of the Premier and Cabinet in partnership with Geoscience Australia completed the $3 million regional pre-competitive geoscience research drilling program. The collaborative program was jointly funded by South Australia's PACE Copper Initiative and the Commonwealth Government's Exploring for the Future program. The drilling contract was awarded to the South Australian based Boart Longyear Australia Pty Ltd (Boart Longyear) via an open competitive tender process.
Boart Longyear drill rig used to retrieve core samples in Coompana, South Australia.
The Australian Passive Seismic Array Project (AusArray) is a collaborative, national survey between government and academia that acquires passive seismic data.
Approximately 80 % of the Australian landmass is blanketed post-mineralisation sedimentary cover and regolith. The cover presents a challenge to successful exploration.
The Geochronology and Isotopic Mapping component of the Exploring for the Future program provided key isotopic datasets in both tabulated compilations, and map form for visualisation with other geological datasets.
