Tectonic Framework and Evolution of the Gawler Craton, Southern Australia

Maximum depth of magnetisation of Australia, its uncertainty, and implications for Curie depth

“…Large depths for the base of magnetisation also characterise the region around the Curnamona Province in western New South Wales and eastern South Australia, a resource-rich area containing ore deposits such as Broken Hill. The Gawler Craton, to the west of the Curnamona Province, is characterised by only moderate (40 km) depths to the base of magnetisation, which are restricted to the known outcrop of the core of the Gawler Craton [24]. The areas surrounding the Gawler Craton to the north and the west feature shallower depths to base of magnetisation (up to 30 km) compared with the results observed for the craton itself.…”

A unified model for gold mineralisation in accretionary orogens and implications for regional-scale exploration targeting methods

“…A very significant but much older example is provided by the c. 1.59 Ga Olympic ironoxide copper-gold (IOCG) province in South Australia. Although deposits in this province, including the supergiant Olympic Dam deposit, are associated with a major mantle upwelling that generated bimodal volcanism and massive crustal melting centred in the middle of the Gawler Craton (Gawler Range Volcanics and Hiltaba Suite granitoids), they show a strong spatial association with the pre-existing (c.1.7 Ga) Kimban suture zone, occurring in a sub-parallel belt 100-150 km inboard of this (Hand et al 2007). …”

“…Consistent with this, an increasing number of major gold provinces with a variety of deposit styles throughout the world have been shown to occur at the margins of older, pre-existing cratonic lithospheric domains. These include the NorsemanWiluna Belt (Cassidy 2006), Abitibi Belt (Faure et al 2011), Bingham Canyon (Groves et al 2005a, Olympic IOCG province (Hand et al 2007), NE Siberia gold province (Nokleberg et al 2005), New Guinea Highlands (Hill et al 2002), Stawell, Victoria (Miller et al 2006) and the Tombstone-Tintina Belt (Mair et al 2011).…”

Glimpses of East Antarctica: Aeromagnetic and satellite magnetic view from the central Transantarctic Mountains of East Antarctica

“…Common anomaly sources include granites and felsic orthogneisses, perhaps in combination with underplated lower crustal gabbroic rocks such as found in the ∼1.4 Ga Granite-Rhyolite province in the southwestern United States [Anderson and Cullers, 1999;Finn and Sims, 2005;Van Schmus et al, 1993] and Paleoproterozoic to Mesoproterozoic intrusions in the Gawler Craton of South Australia, including the ∼1.85 Ga Donington, ∼1.68 Tunkillia, and ∼1.59 Ga Hiltaba suites [Daly et al, 1998;Fanning et al, 2007;Hand et al, 2007]. Strong positive anomalies are also found over banded iron formation (e.g., Hamersley Basin in western Australia [Clark and Schmidt, 1994] and Prince Charles Mountains in East Antarctica [Golynsky et al, 2006;McLean et al, 2008]), Archean granites in granitegreenstone belts, granulite facies greenstone belts containing metamorphosed gabbros, serpentinized ultramafic rocks, and charnockites (e.g., southern India Peninsular terrane [Ram Babu and Prasanthi Lakshmi, 2005]).…”