Historical exploration in the Tennant Creek Region

The Tennant Creek mineral field in Australia gained attention in the 1930s when it was discovered that gold was closely linked with ironstone, unlike the usual association with quartz in other mining fields.

Since then, the field has produced 5.5 million ounces of gold, along with significant amounts of copper, bismuth, and silver. However, production declined substantially by the 1990s.

During the decline of the first phase of development, mineral field exploration was largely dependent on locating new mineralised areas based on magnetic signatures associated with ironstone.

The dependency on magnetic signatures only provided positional data with limited context for understanding the orientation of possible mineralisation, making it challenging to accurately place exploration drill holes.

Truscott Mining Corporation then introduced structural analysis to enhance the effectiveness of exploration practices and support deposit modelling and mining design.

Ongoing research has provided insights and understanding of the folding and shearing of the ancient rock mass that is the hosting environment for gold and associated mineralisation.

Mathematical modelling has described locations where folding and shearing interact to describe the locations at which host environments for mineralisation occur in the basement rocks.

The mathematic models are further able to characterise the mineralisation, such that the orientation and the scale or size of systems can be described.

As part of the scientific process, data from historical mines and ore body models in the region, have been tested against the mathematical models, further demonstrating their accuracy.

It has been observed that other explorers are adopting similar approaches to describe and explore additional ore bodies in accordance with a Truscott’s publicly released findings.

By Donald and Isabel Dowling, CC BY-SA 4.0