Exploring for the Future: Integrated geoscience supporting exploration and discovery in the under-cover Tennant Creek – Mount Isa region

While much of the focus in addressing the challenges of undercover exploration lies in how to directly detect the footprints of buried mineral systems, an equally significant challenge is the identification of new prospective exploration fairways at a regional (or larger) scale which have not been previously recognised or effectively explored. This narrowing of the search space is a key objective of the Australian Government’s Exploring for the Future (EFTF) program, a four-year (2016–2020), $100.5 million program investigating the mineral, energy and groundwater resource potential in northern Australia and parts of South Australia (Figure 1). The program is delivering new geoscience data, knowledge and decision support tools that support increased industry investment and sustainable economic development. The Tennant Creek to Mount Isa (TISA) area emerged as an area of interest for the EFTF program on the basis of geophysical, geochemical and geological datasets acquired in northern Australia. Data have been acquired at a range of scales and depths, from the base of the lithosphere to the surface, arguably making the TISA area the best-imaged piece of lithosphere on Earth. It is increasingly recognised that large-scale controls, often expressed deep in the Earth’s crust and mantle, are important for localising large mineral systems. Large hydrothermal mineral systems have expressions at mantle depth in datasets such as long-period magnetotellurics (MT) and seismic velocity. Clues from these deep imaging datasets in the TISA area, together with more conventional and near-surface lines of evidence, have led to the identification of the East Tennant region as a new mineral exploration fairway. The East Tennant region is an entirely buried corridor of interpreted high mineral systems potential between Tennant Creek in the west and the Murphy Province near the Queensland border in the east. This abstract outlines the key rationale for selecting this region, new insights and follow-up data acquisition, as well as future plans for stratigraphic drilling to test models, ideas and predictions arising from the integration of multi-disciplinary datasets. Abstract submitted to 21st Annual Geoscience Exploration Seminar (AGES), 24-25 March 2020 (https://industry.nt.gov.au/news/2020/march/ages-2020)