The Australian Resource Reviews are periodic national assessments of individual mineral commodities. The reviews include evaluations of short-term and long-term trends for each mineral resource, world rankings, production data, significant exploration results and an overview of mining industry developments.

This Record presents new Sensitive High Resolution Ion Micro Probe (SHRIMP) U–Pb geochronological results for five drill core samples from the Rover mineral field, an area of prospective Palaeoproterozoic rocks southwest of Tennant Creek that is entirely concealed below younger sedimentary cover rocks. The work is part of an ongoing collaborative effort between Geoscience Australia (GA) and the Northern Territory Geological Survey (NTGS) that aims to develop better understanding of the geological evolution and mineral potential of this region. It is being undertaken as part of the Northern Territory Government’s Resourcing the Territory (RTT) initiative and the Federal Government’s Exploring for the Future (EFTF) program and was carried out under the auspices of the National Collaborative Framework (NCF) between GA and NTGS. The rocks studied were sampled from drill cores acquired under the Northern Territory Government’s Geophysics and Drilling Collaborations program; the drillholes sampled comprise RVDD0002 (Wetherley and Elliston 2019), MXCURD002 (Burke 2015) and R27ARD18 (Anderson 2010). <b>Bibliographic Reference:</b> Cross A, Huston D and Farias P, 2021. Summary of results. Joint NTGS–GA geochronology project: Rover mineral field, Warramunga Province, January–June 2020. <i>Northern Territory Geological Survey</i>, <b>Record 2021-003</b>.

Studies of three global sediment-hosted zinc provinces (Mt Isa, Australia; Northern Cordillera, Canada/USA; Irish Midlands, Ireland) indicate that deposits in all three provinces are associated with gradients in many geological parameters. These include lead isotopes, the depth of the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary, upward-continued gravity and magnetotellurics data. These gradients are interpreted to mark major cratonic boundaries, or edges, that control the distribution of these deposits in space and in time. Studies of the Mt Isa Province indicate that regional alteration has caused extensive loss of zinc, copper and cobalt, potentially providing more than sufficient metal for the known deposits. Moreover, in some cases, metal loss corresponds to changes in rock properties, possibly enabling regional mapping of zones of metal loss using geophysical data.