The Heavy Mineral Map of Australia: vision, implementation and progress

Heavy minerals (HMs) have been used successfully around the world in energy and mineral exploration, yet in Australia no public domain database or maps exist that document the background HM assemblages or distributions. Here, we describe a project that delivers the world’s first continental-scale HM maps. We applied automated mineralogical identification and quantification of the HMs contained in floodplain sediments from large catchments covering most of Australia. The composition of the sediments reflects the dominant rock types in each catchment, with the generally resistant HMs largely preserving the mineralogical fingerprint of their host protoliths through the weathering–transport–deposition cycle. Underpinning this vision was a pilot project, based on 10 samples from the national sediment sample archive, which in 2020 demonstrated the feasibility of a larger, national-scale project. Two tranches of the subsequent national HM dataset, one focusing on a 965,000 km2 region centred on Broken Hill in southeastern Australia, the other focusing on a 950,000 km2 area in northern Queensland and Northern Territory, were released in 2022. In those releases, over 47 million mineral grains were analysed in 411 samples, identifying over 150 HM species. We created a bespoke, cloud-based mineral network analysis (MNA) tool to visualize, explore and discover relationships between HMs as well as between them and geological settings or mineral deposits. We envisage that the Heavy Mineral Map of Australia and MNA tool, when released publicly by the end of 2023, will contribute significantly to mineral prospectivity analysis and modelling, particularly for technology critical elements and their host minerals Citation: Caritat P. de, Walker A.T., Bastrakov E. & McInnes B.I.A., 2023. From The Heavy Mineral Map of Australia: vision, implementation and progress. In: Czarnota, K. (ed.) Exploring for the Future: Extended Abstracts, Geoscience Australia, Canberra, https://dx.doi.org/10.26186/148678