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Heavy mineral exploration on a continental scale: the Geoscience Australia-Curtin Heavy Mineral Map of Australia project

Created 16/10/2025

Updated 16/10/2025

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Although heavy mineral exploration techniques have been successfully used as exploration vectors to ore deposits around the world, exploration case studies and pre-competitive datasets relevant to Australian conditions are relatively limited. The Heavy Mineral Map of Australia (HMMA) project is a novel analytical campaign to determine the abundance and distribution of heavy minerals (SG>2.9 g/cc) in 1315 floodplain sediment samples collected from catchments across Australia during Geoscience Australia’s National Geochemical Survey of Australia (NGSA) project. Archived NGSA samples, which originated from, on average, 60 to 80 cm depth in floodplain landforms, were sub-sampled and subjected to dense media separation and automated SEM-EDS analysis in the John de Laeter Centre at Curtin University. Mineral assay data from all 1315 drainage samples will be publicly released by the end of 2023.

An initial data package released in August 2022 contains mineralogical assay data for 223 samples from the Darling–Curnamona–Delamerian (DCD) region of south-eastern Australia. That package identified over 140 heavy minerals from 29 million individual mineral observations. The number of mineral observations generated during the project required development of a novel Mineral Network Analysis (MNA) tool to allow end users to discover, visualise and interpret mineral co-occurrence relationships, potentially useful in exploration vectoring and targeting. The MNA tool can also be used to rapidly search the heavy mineral database to locate observations of potential economic significance. The co-occurrence of Zn-minerals indicative of high-grade metamorphism of base metal mineralisation (e.g., gahnite (Zn-spinel), ecandrewsite (Zn-ilmenite) and zincostaurolite (Zn-aluminosilicate)) from the region surrounding Broken Hill demonstrated the utility of the method. Zn-mineral co-occurrences not associated with known mineralisation were also noted and may represent targeting opportunities.

Heavy mineral data from parts of Queensland are scheduled for a separate public release in December 2022 and will be presented at the conference.  This Abstract was submitted/presented to the 2023 Australian Exploration Geoscience Conference 13-18 Mar (https://2023.aegc.com.au/)

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Field Value
Title Heavy mineral exploration on a continental scale: the Geoscience Australia-Curtin Heavy Mineral Map of Australia project
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/22680cd0-2aaf-4441-aa36-4e5fcebab967
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period 10/08/2022
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
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Data Portal Geoscience Australia

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Geoscience Australia "Heavy mineral exploration on a continental scale: the Geoscience Australia-Curtin Heavy Mineral Map of Australia project". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/heavy-mineral-exploration-on-a-continental-scale-the-geoscience-australia-curtin-heavy-mineral-