UNCOVER – Progress in the vision for exploration geosciences and mineral discovery in Australia
The UNCOVER initiative in our national mineral exploration endeavours, formulated under the aegis of the Australian Academy of Sciences aims to build a strategy which will find new Tier 1 mineral deposits under the 80% of Australia where favourable geology lies below regolith or other barren cover. This will be facilitated by increasing the national conversation between industry, research providers (academia and CSIRO), government surveys, and policy-development arms of government, in order to enhance the communication, direction and focus of new technologies, models and exploration programs.
The UNCOVER Executive Committee last April welcomed The Honourable Martin Ferguson AM (a past Minister for Resources and Energy in the Rudd-Gillard governments) as Patron. In this role we believe Mr Ferguson will greatly assist in our liason with policy-makers in government.
The UNCOVER initiative has progressed this year on four fronts. Firstly, publication of the Summit presentations by the ASEG, at request of the UNCOVER Executive, meets the need for an archiving of the Summit material in a citeable, discoverable and downloadable form, and we have achieved this by use of the Preview format which assures that CSIRO Publishing will host this resource as a permanent archive, accessible through standard databases and web searches. Two summaries linked at the head of the list of contents are vital reading for all explorationists; the first summarises strategy and emerging geosciences priorities as identified in the Summit, while the second summarises the findings of the post-Summit cover thickness mapping workshop. The synergies of airborne gravity gradiometry with airborne EM (AEM) for determining regolith thickness, and of both active and passive seismic methods with ground EM data are points well made in this review.
Secondly, an UNCOVER Geoscience Committee has been formed under chairmanship of Steve Beresford, Chief Geologist of First Quantum Minerals Ltd. One of the roles of the Geoscience Committee will be to identify and recommend endorsement of projects, in particular “headline projects” which may become the focus of the UNCOVER initiative.
Thirdly, AMIRA International has launched a Road-Map initiative as part of Project P1162: Unlocking Australia’s Hidden Potential, under the leadership of Robbie Rowe of NextGen Geological Pty Ltd. This initiative will provide an opportunity for industry to contribute to a blueprint for addressing the challenges and gaps in knowledge, technology capability together with an assessment of the research capacity (human resources and infrastructure) required to improve the exploration success rate in areas of post mineral cover. Further details are available here. AMIRA advise that this project P1162 has now received the necessary threshold funding and has commenced with an impressive total of 31 companies and government agencies signed up.
Fourthly, Geoscience Australia and the Australian state and Northern Territory geological surveys have embraced the UNCOVER initiative as a major part of their support for the mineral exploration industry. Richard Blewett, Group Leader Mineral Systems for Geoscience Australia, gives an overview of the effort, currently beginning with studies in the Stavely area under Murray Basin cover of western Victoria, and continuing with studies in the Thomson Orogen of northern NSW, Queensland and Northern Territory. These projects have the involvement of a number of geoscientists within Geoscience Australia, plus additional input from state surveys and universities. See more here.
Preview (the news magazine of the Australian Society of Exploration Geophysicists) this month publishes online sixty presentations from the UNCOVER Summit and post-Summit Workshop, held in Adelaide 31 March-2 April.
Michael Asten
Australian Geoscience Council Representative on the UNCOVER Executive
(Michael Asten is a professor of geophysics at Monash University, Melbourne. michael.asten@monash.edu)
