The Exploring for the Future program is an initiative by the Australian Government dedicated to boosting investment in resource exploration in Australia. The initial phase of this program led by Geoscience Australia focussed on northern Australia to gather new data and information about the potential mineral, energy and groundwater resources concealed beneath the surface. The northern Lawn Hill Platform is an intracratonic poly-phased history region of Paleoproterozoic to Mesoproterozic age consisting of mixed carbonates, siliciclastics and volcanics. It is considered a frontier basin with very little petroleum exploration to date, but with renewed interest in shale and tight gas, that may present new exploration opportunities. An understanding of the geochemistry of the sedimentary units, including the organic richness, hydrocarbon-generating potential and thermal maturity, is therefore an important characteristic needed to understand the resource potential of the region. As part of this program, Rock-Eval pyrolysis analyses were undertaken by Geoscience Australia on selected rock samples from 2 wells of the northern Lawn Hill Platform.

The Geoscience Australia Rock Properties database stores the result measurements of scalar and vector petrophysical properties of rock and regolith specimens and hydrogeological data. Oracle database and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web services. Links to Samples, Field Sites, Boreholes. <b>Value:</b> Essential for relating geophysical measurements to geology and hydrogeology and thereby constraining geological, geophysical and groundwater models of the Earth <b>Scope:</b> Data are sourced from all states and territories of Australia

Collection of mineral, gem, meteorite, fossil (including the Commonwealth Palaeontological Collection) and petrographic thin section specimens dating back to the early 1900s. The collection is of scientific, historic, aesthetic, and social significance. Geoscience Australia is responsible for the management and preservation of the collection, as well as facilitating access to the collection for research, and geoscience education and outreach. Over 700 specimens from the collection are displayed in our public gallery . The collection contains: • 15,000 gem, mineral and meteorite specimens from localities in Australia and across the globe. • 45,000 published palaeontological specimens contained in the Commonwealth Palaeontological Collection (CPC) mainly from Australia. • 1,000,000 unpublished fossils in a ‘Bulk Fossil’ collection. • 250,000 petrographic thin section slides. • 200 historical geoscience instruments including: cartography, geophysical, and laboratory equipment." <b>Value: </b>Specimens in the collection are derived from Geoscience Australia (GA) surveys, submissions by researchers, donations, purchases and bequests. A number of mineral specimens are held on behalf of the National Museum of Australia. <b>Scope: </b>This is a national collection that began in the early 1900s with early Commonwealth surveys collecting material across the country and British territories. The mineral specimens are mainly from across Australia, with a strong representation from major mineral deposits such as Broken Hill, and almost 40% from the rest of the world. The majority of fossils are from Australia, with a small proportion from lands historically or currently under Australian control, such as Papua New Guinea and the Australian Antarctic Territory.

A `weighted geometric median' approach has been used to estimate the median surface reflectance of the barest state (i.e., least vegetation) observed through Landsat-8 Operational Land Image (OLI) observations from 2013 to September 2018 to generate a six-band Landsat-8 Barest Earth pixel composite mosaic over the Australian continent. The bands include BLUE (0.452 - 0.512), GREEN (0.533 - 0.590), RED, (0.636 - 0.673) NIR (0.851 - 0.879), SWIR1 (1.566 - 1.651) and SWIR2 (2.107 - 2.294) wavelength regions. The weighted median approach is robust to outliers (such as cloud, shadows, saturation, corrupted pixels) and also maintains the relationship between all the spectral wavelengths in the spectra observed through time. The product reduces the influence of vegetation and allows for more direct mapping of soil and rock mineralogy. Reference: Dale Roberts, John Wilford, and Omar Ghattas (2018). Revealing the Australian Continent at its Barest, submitted. <b>Value: </b>Has broad application in mapping surface geochemistry and mineralogy of exposed soil and bedrock. Has applications in geological mapping and natural resource management including mapping of soil characteristics. <b>Scope: </b>Two enhanced bare earth products have been generated reflecting different Landsat satellites and acquisition periods. The first only uses Landsat 8 observations from 2013 to 2018. The second incorporates the full 30+ year archive combining Landsat 5, 7, and 8 from 1986 to 2018.

Data in the GEOCHEM database comprises inorganic geochemical analytical data and associated metadata. Geochemical data comprises concentration data (value, error, unit of measure) measured on a range of analytical instruments, for a range of elements of the periodic table. Associated metadata includes information on analytical techniques, analytical methodology, laboratory, analysts, date of analysis, detection limits, accuracy, and precision. The GEOCHEM database also records results for reference standards. Data is specifically for rocks, soils and other unconsolidated geological material and does not include oils, gases or water analyses. Geochemical data may be total rock (i.e., whole rock analysed) or for a variety of fractions of the total rock, e.g., various non-total acid digests, mineral separates, differing size fractions. It also includes quantitative to semi-quantitative data from field measurements, such as portable x-ray fluorescence (XRF). It does not include geochemical data for individual minerals. <b>Value: </b>Geochemical data underpins much geoscientific study, and is used directly to classify, characterise and understand geological material and its formation. It has direct relevance to understanding the formation of the earth, the continents, and the processes that create and shape the surface we live on. For example, this information is used within: both discovering and the understanding of mineral deposits we depend on; the nature, health and sustainability of the soils we live and farm on; as well as providing input into a range of potential geohazards. <b>Scope: </b>The collection includes data from over 60 years of Geoscience Australia (GA) and state/territory partner regional geological projects within Australia, as well as continental-scale and regional geochemical surveys like National Geochemical Survey of Australia (NGSA) and Northern Australia Geochemical Survey (NAGS) (Exploring for the Future- EFTF). It also includes data from other countries that GA has worked with, e.g., Papua New Guinea, Antarctica, Solomon Islands and New Zealand. Explore the <b>Geoscience Australia portal - <a href="https://portal.ga.gov.au/">https://portal.ga.gov.au/</a></b>

This Geoscience Australia Record reports the findings of the Canning Basin Petroleum Systems Modelling Project. The southern, frontier portions of the Canning Basin have numerous potential hydrocarbon play opportunities, in particular unconventional gas plays, which remain untested. Of particular interest are Ordovician-aged petroleum systems. Geoscience Australia in collaboration with the Geological Survey of Western Australia acquired an 872 km long 2D seismic line across the south and south-west Canning Basin in 2018, and drilled the 2680 m stratigraphic hole Barnicarndy 1 in the Barnicarndy Graben to further develop the understanding of hydrocarbon prospectivity in these frontier regions. As part of the Exploring for the Future program Geoscience Australia contracted GNS Science to construct ten 1D petroleum systems models and one 2D model across the frontier southern parts of the basin. The aim was to combine interpretation of the newly acquired seismic data with interpretation of legacy and new well data, in particular organic geochemical data, to improve the understanding of the burial and thermal history, trap formation, generation and migration of hydrocarbons in the southern, frontier parts of the Canning Basin. This Record is a compilation of the work completed by GNS Science International Limited and the reports containing new data collected and analyzed relevant to the petroleum systems modelling.

The Sentinel-2 Bare Earth thematic product provides the first national scale mosaic of the Australian continent to support improved mapping of soil and geology. The bare earth algorithm using all available Sentinel-2 A and Sentinel-2 B observations up to September 2020 preferentially weights bare pixels through time to significantly reduce the effect of seasonal vegetation in the imagery. The result are image pixels that are more likely to reflect the mineralogy and/or geochemistry of soil and bedrock. The algorithm uses a high-dimensional weighted geometric median approach that maintains the spectral relationships across all Sentinel-2 bands. A similar bare earth algorithm has been applied to Geoscience Australia’s deeper Landsat time series archive (please search for "Landsat barest Earth". Both bare earth products have spectral bands in the visible near infrared and shortwave infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, the main visible and near-infrared Sentinel-2 bands have a spatial resolution of 10 meters compared to 30m for the Landsat TM equivalents. The weighted median approach is robust to outliers (such as cloud, shadows, saturation, corrupted pixels) and also maintains the relationship between all the spectral wavelengths in the spectra observed through time. Not all the sentinel-2 bands have been processed - we have excluded atmospheric bands including 1, 9 and 10. The remaining bands have been re-number 1-10 and these bands correlate to the original bands in brackets below: 1 = blue (2) , 2 = green (3) , 3 = red (4), 4 = vegetation red edge (5), 5 = vegetation red edge (6), 6= vegetation red edge (7), 7 = NIR(8), 8 = Narrow NIR (8a), 9 = SWIR1 (11) and 10 = SWIR2(12). All 10 bands have been resampled to 10 meters to facilitate band integration and use in machine learning.

<div><strong>Output type: </strong>Exploring for the Future Extended Abstract</div><div><br></div><div><strong>Short abstract: </strong>Western Tasmania is a rich mineral province that hosts Cambrian VHMS and Devonian granite-related Sn-W systems in the Dundas Element. By comparison, the Rocky Cape region of northwest Tasmania has not been extensively explored for mineral deposits. New U-Pb monazite geochronology and galena Pb isotope data were collected from several sediment-hosted, vein style Cu-Co-Pb-Zn prospects in the Rocky Cape Element of northwest Tasmania. The identification of REE and cobaltite in some samples indicates the potential for critical minerals in this region. This is the first identification of a mineralizing system of Mesoproterozoic age in Tasmania, approximately 800 million years older than the well-known Cambrian mineralisation events in western Tasmania. These data indicate that mineralization formed during the Mesoproterozoic, broadly contemporaneous with the deposition of the Rocky Cape Group.&nbsp;</div><div><br></div><div><strong>Citation: </strong>Armistead S.E., Meffre S., Bottril R.S., Cross A. &amp; Huston D., 2024. U-Pb monazite geochronology from the Rocky Cape Group: new evidence for Mesoproterozoic Cu-Co-Pb-Zn mineralisation in north-west Tasmania. In: Czarnota, K. (ed.) Exploring for the Future: Extended Abstracts. Geoscience Australia, Canberra, https://doi.org/10.26186/149292</div>

<div>NDI Carrara 1 is a deep stratigraphic drill hole completed in 2020 as part of the MinEx CRC National Drilling Initiative (NDI) in collaboration with Geoscience Australia and the Northern Territory Geological Survey. It is the first test of the Carrara Sub-Basin, a depocentre newly discovered in the South Nicholson region based on interpretation from seismic surveys (L210 in 2017 and L212 in 2019) recently acquired as part of the Exploring for the Future program. The drill hole intersected approximately 1100 m of Proterozoic sedimentary rocks uncomformably overlain by 630 m of Cambrian Georgina Basin carbonates. A comprehensive geochemical program designed to provide information about the region’s resource potential was carried out on samples collected at up to 4 meter intervals. This report presents data from Rock-Eval pyrolysis analyses undertaken by Geoscience Australia on selected rock samples to establish their total organic carbon content, hydrocarbon-generating potential and thermal maturity.</div>

<div>NDI Carrara 1 is a deep stratigraphic drill hole completed in 2020 as part of the MinEx CRC National Drilling Initiative (NDI) in collaboration with Geoscience Australia and the Northern Territory Geological Survey. It is the first stratigraphic test of the Carrara Sub-basin, a depocentre newly discovered in the South Nicholson region based on interpretation from seismic surveys (L210 in 2017 and L212 in 2019) acquired as part of the Exploring for the Future program. The drill hole intersected approximately 1120 m of Proterozoic sedimentary rocks unconformably overlain by 630 m of Georgina Basin carbonates.&nbsp;</div><div>Geoscience Australia has undertaken a range of investigations on the lithology, stratigraphy and geotechnical properties of NDI Carrara 1 as well as undertaking a range of analyses of about 500 physical samples recovered through the entire core. Analyses included geochronology, isotope studies, mineralogy, inorganic and organic geochemistry, petrophysics, geomechanics, thermal maturity and petroleum systems investigations.</div><div>Rock-Eval pyrolysis raw data undertaken by Geoscience Australia were reported in Butcher et al. (2021) on selected rock samples to establish their total organic carbon content, hydrocarbon-generating potential and thermal maturity. Interpretation of the Rock-Eval pyrolysis data concluded that a large portion of rocks within the Proterozoic section displayed unreliable Tmax values due to poorly defined S2 peaks resulting from high thermal maturity and low hydrogen content. In order to obtain more reliable Tmax values, Rock-Eval pyrolysis of selected isolated kerogens, where organic matter is concentrated and mineral matrix effects are removed, were conducted and the resulting data are presented in this report.&nbsp;</div><div><br></div>