Keynote addressDiscovering the next

Keynote address
Discovering the next generation of mineral deposits—what are the right questions?
Dr Neil Williams
I trust that you are all fired up to think about searching deep beneath Australia for our new resources. To help get you started, I am going to challenge you in my presentation to think carefully about what are the right questions that we should be asking. In 1946, at the end of World War II, the great Australian geologist Sir Harold Raggatt convinced the then Commonwealth government in Canberra to set up a national geological survey. It was called the Bureau of Mineral Resources (BMR) and in time it evolved into Geoscience Australia (GA). The basis for the government’s decision to set up the BMR was Sir Harold Raggatt’s vision that, with good regional geological and geophysical maps, industry would be able to discover new mineral wealth and Australia would one day be a very wealthy country due in large part to its mineral resources. The animation I am about to show demonstrates just how well Sir Harold Raggatt’s vision has been realised. The animation was actually made by Phil McFadden when he was GA’s Chief Scientist and it shows mineral discoveries year by year from the year 1946 to 2001. You will see a red fl ash when there is a discovery and then that red flash will collapse back into a little yellow circle, which will remain. Very importantly, on the left-hand side, in dollars, you will see export earnings from Australia’s minerals. You will see that they are very impressive.
Were Phil to update the animation, you would see two things. Firstly, you would see that mineral exports now stand at about $75 billion per annum; so it is really a very, very significant part of the Australian economy. Secondly, you would note, if you had a good eye or Phil slowed the animation down, that the discovery rate of greenfields deposits is slowing. We have seen tremendous growth in mineral production over the past few years, but this has come from accelerated production at existing mines, from brownfields exploration within and adjacent to known mineralisation and also from innovations that have improved the efficiency and effectiveness of mining and processing. But we do have a problem in the greenfields area. These are the sorts of explorations where you build new mineral provinces, new mines and new towns – activities that sustain the long-term health and wealth of the industry. This issue of the slowing down of greenfields success in Australia has been troubling. It certainly concerns the Australian Government as well as the state and territory governments. Over the years there have been several inquiries into what is the problem with greenfields exploration. One of the better known inquiries was the Prosser inquiry, which was undertaken by the House of Representatives in Canberra. Like many other reports it highlights the big problem, which is stated here: ‘...as yet “undiscovered” world-class ore deposits are most probably concealed by barren soils or barren cover rock sequences’. This is the challenge, or a good example of the challenge, for all of you—but, to my mind, it is an exciting, intellectually stimulating and economically rewarding challenge to take on. This slide shows the black soil plains of the Barkley Tableland north-west of Mount Isa. The nearest areas of regional outcrop to the spot where I took this photo constitute one of the most richly endowed parts of the Earth’s crust for lead-zinc mineralisation. There is every likelihood that, somewhere beneath these vast, featureless black soil plains, giant lead-zinc deposits will be lurking and awaiting discovery. The question is: can we find them? As a former mineral explorer and optimist, my view is that of course we can —‘Yes, we can,’ as someone else recently said. But the big challenge really is – how do we go about doing it? We know that what we are doing at present in exploration is beginning to fail and we therefore need to think beyond the current exploration ‘paradigm’: we need to think beyond the square and to go about deep exploration in a different way from how we do exploration today in what I will from now on refer to as ‘surface exploration’. Dr Neil Williams Let’s go from northwest Queensland to another equally flat part of Australia. This slide shows the landscape around Woomera near the famous old rocket range in central South Australia. One of the reasons that I am so optimistic about the future of mineral exploration in Australia is based on what has been achieved in exploration in the Woomera region. Where I grew up, in Albury, NSW, the landscape that you see on this slide was called the ‘back of beyond’. It has many other names, few of them flattering. However, for all geoscientists, both here in Australia and all around the world, this place is, or should be, a place of great wonder because lurking 350 metres below the desert’s surface, at a sheep station called Roxby Downs, sits one of the world’s biggest known ore deposits: the super-giant Olympic Dam deposit. Olympic Dam was discovered in 1975 by the then Western Mining Corporation. The WMC team that found Olympic Dam was led by the great Australian mineral explorer Roy Woodall. We have the privilege of having Roy here with us today. Roy is a legendary figure in the world of mineral exploration. I hope that all of you take the opportunity to talk to Roy—because, if ever there was a person to think beyond the square and to ask the right questions and challenge his staff to do the same, it was Roy. Olympic Dam is now owned and operated by BHP Billiton and, on the basis of known resources, it is now ranked as the world’s fourth largest copper deposit, the world’s largest uranium deposit and the world’s fifth largest gold deposit— all of that in one deposit. It is truly a giant amongst giants. That is all the more impressive when you remember that we still do not know just how big Olympic Dam is, as it has yet to be drilled out fully. Furthermore, the deposit is of a type of mineralisation that was previously unknown and is now generally referred to as an iron oxide-copper-gold deposit. I do not like that term; I think it deserves its own name: it is an Olympic Dam type deposit because of its huge size and uniqueness. Olympic Dam occurs in basement rocks beneath 350 metres of relatively fl at-lying cover sediments that are a billion years younger than the 1.6-billion-year-old rocks that host the deposit. The discovery of Olympic Dam provides some fantastic insights into how we might go about future deep exploration, so let’s have a quick look at how WMC went about finding the deposit. In the little time that I have, I cannot do full justice to the discovery, but I will try to capture the key elements of the discovery. Dr Neil Williams 41 The thinking that led to the discovery was developed by a team with diverse expertise. One member of that team was a structural geologist, Tim O’Driscoll, who had discovered that, if you carefully analysed BMR’s national- scale geophysical maps, you could see long linear features crisscrossing the country. This slide shows one of Tim’s processed BMR magnetic maps of Australia. His main lineaments are marked on the slide. This work was, and remains to some, controversial but, without Tim O’Driscoll’s lineaments, I doubt that Olympic Dam would be a mine today. He noted along the way that many of Australia’s big mineral deposits lay on these lineaments and actually, more often than not, lay where they crossed one another. This is Kalgoorlie and here we have Kambalda. The famous giant Kalgoorlie gold system, for example, sits where these two lineaments cross one another. Another member of the team was Doug Haynes; he had done a PhD at the Australian National University. He research topic centred on what sourced the copper in large copper deposits. Based on his PhD research, he developed a sediment-hosted copper exploration model that led to WMC’s copper exploration program to focus on areas of South Australia underlain by particular basic igneous rocks: the copper source rocks that were an important element of the search model and of Doug’s PhD thesis. One such area of known copper mineralisation was at Mount Gunson, well south of Olympic Dam. At Mount Gunson, beneath the known mineralisation, in the BMR’s regional geophysical data sets there was an area with coincident gravity and magnetic anomalies that was interpreted to be Doug’s copper source rocks - basic igneous rocks. Interestingly, Mount Gunson also lay at the intersection of two of Tim O’Driscoll’s lineaments. Another member of the WMC team, geophysicist Hugh Rutter, had identified from BMR’s regional magnetic and gravity maps some other areas of coincident magnetic and gravity anomalism well north of Mount Gunson and these were refined as drilling targets, using Tim O’Driscoll’s lineaments.
Dr Neil Williams On this slide we see these particular lineaments – and indeed these two cross where Olympic Dam was subsequently discovered. I have skimmed across a fascinating story and I am sure that a lot more can be told. Interestingly for me, at Olympic Dam, we now know that the mineralised body is strung out in this direction – the same as one of Tim O’Driscoll’s lineaments. This suggests a strong structural control on the location of this giant deposit and I think it gives additional support to the ideas that Tim put together back in the 1970s. This is a modern-day image of the regional magnetic and gravity data that cover the Olympic Dam region. Magnetics are on the left and gravity is on the right, and the little faint white circles show the position of Olympic Dam. You might ask after looking at the two images: ‘Well, why did WMC drill where they were?’ The answer is: ‘Remember the lineaments’. The point I want to make now is that these data were available through the old BMR to anyone who was interested in exploring for m

Results (Chinese) 1:

主旨演讲发现的矿藏的下一代 — — 正确的问题是什么?尼尔 · 威廉姆斯博士我相信，你是火力全开，想想在我们新的资源澳大利亚地下深处搜索。为了帮助你开始，我要挑战你仔细思考什么是正确的问题，我们应该问我演示文稿中。1946 年，在世界第二次世界大战结束大澳大利亚地质学家先生哈罗德 Raggatt 相信堪培拉成立国家地质调查局当时的英联邦政府。它被称为矿物资源局 (BMR) 和时间在它演变成地学澳大利亚 (GA)。政府决定设立 BMR 的依据是爵士哈罗德 Raggatt 视觉，具有良好的区域地质和地球物理图，行业将能够发现新的矿产财富和澳大利亚总有一天会成为一个非常富裕的国家，由于在很大程度对其矿产资源。多么好先生哈罗德 Raggatt 视觉已经意识到我将要显示的动画演示动画居然出自 Phil 麦克法登时他 GA 的首席科学家和它节目矿产资源的发现年从 1946年到 2001 年。你会看到红色 fl 灰时发现，然后那红色闪光将再次陷入一个小的黄色圆圈，将保持。很重要的是，在左手边，以美元计算，你会看到从澳大利亚的矿物出口收入。你会看到他们都是非常令人印象深刻。Were Phil to update the animation, you would see two things. Firstly, you would see that mineral exports now stand at about $75 billion per annum; so it is really a very, very significant part of the Australian economy. Secondly, you would note, if you had a good eye or Phil slowed the animation down, that the discovery rate of greenfields deposits is slowing. We have seen tremendous growth in mineral production over the past few years, but this has come from accelerated production at existing mines, from brownfields exploration within and adjacent to known mineralisation and also from innovations that have improved the efficiency and effectiveness of mining and processing. But we do have a problem in the greenfields area. These are the sorts of explorations where you build new mineral provinces, new mines and new towns – activities that sustain the long-term health and wealth of the industry. This issue of the slowing down of greenfields success in Australia has been troubling. It certainly concerns the Australian Government as well as the state and territory governments. Over the years there have been several inquiries into what is the problem with greenfields exploration. One of the better known inquiries was the Prosser inquiry, which was undertaken by the House of Representatives in Canberra. Like many other reports it highlights the big problem, which is stated here: ‘...as yet “undiscovered” world-class ore deposits are most probably concealed by barren soils or barren cover rock sequences’. This is the challenge, or a good example of the challenge, for all of you—but, to my mind, it is an exciting, intellectually stimulating and economically rewarding challenge to take on. This slide shows the black soil plains of the Barkley Tableland north-west of Mount Isa. The nearest areas of regional outcrop to the spot where I took this photo constitute one of the most richly endowed parts of the Earth’s crust for lead-zinc mineralisation. There is every likelihood that, somewhere beneath these vast, featureless black soil plains, giant lead-zinc deposits will be lurking and awaiting discovery. The question is: can we find them? As a former mineral explorer and optimist, my view is that of course we can —‘Yes, we can,’ as someone else recently said. But the big challenge really is – how do we go about doing it? We know that what we are doing at present in exploration is beginning to fail and we therefore need to think beyond the current exploration ‘paradigm’: we need to think beyond the square and to go about deep exploration in a different way from how we do exploration today in what I will from now on refer to as ‘surface exploration’. Dr Neil Williams Let’s go from northwest Queensland to another equally flat part of Australia. This slide shows the landscape around Woomera near the famous old rocket range in central South Australia. One of the reasons that I am so optimistic about the future of mineral exploration in Australia is based on what has been achieved in exploration in the Woomera region. Where I grew up, in Albury, NSW, the landscape that you see on this slide was called the ‘back of beyond’. It has many other names, few of them flattering. However, for all geoscientists, both here in Australia and all around the world, this place is, or should be, a place of great wonder because lurking 350 metres below the desert’s surface, at a sheep station called Roxby Downs, sits one of the world’s biggest known ore deposits: the super-giant Olympic Dam deposit. Olympic Dam was discovered in 1975 by the then Western Mining Corporation. The WMC team that found Olympic Dam was led by the great Australian mineral explorer Roy Woodall. We have the privilege of having Roy here with us today. Roy is a legendary figure in the world of mineral exploration. I hope that all of you take the opportunity to talk to Roy—because, if ever there was a person to think beyond the square and to ask the right questions and challenge his staff to do the same, it was Roy. Olympic Dam is now owned and operated by BHP Billiton and, on the basis of known resources, it is now ranked as the world’s fourth largest copper deposit, the world’s largest uranium deposit and the world’s fifth largest gold deposit— all of that in one deposit. It is truly a giant amongst giants. That is all the more impressive when you remember that we still do not know just how big Olympic Dam is, as it has yet to be drilled out fully. Furthermore, the deposit is of a type of mineralisation that was previously unknown and is now generally referred to as an iron oxide-copper-gold deposit. I do not like that term; I think it deserves its own name: it is an Olympic Dam type deposit because of its huge size and uniqueness. Olympic Dam occurs in basement rocks beneath 350 metres of relatively fl at-lying cover sediments that are a billion years younger than the 1.6-billion-year-old rocks that host the deposit. The discovery of Olympic Dam provides some fantastic insights into how we might go about future deep exploration, so let’s have a quick look at how WMC went about finding the deposit. In the little time that I have, I cannot do full justice to the discovery, but I will try to capture the key elements of the discovery. Dr Neil Williams 41 The thinking that led to the discovery was developed by a team with diverse expertise. One member of that team was a structural geologist, Tim O’Driscoll, who had discovered that, if you carefully analysed BMR’s national- scale geophysical maps, you could see long linear features crisscrossing the country. This slide shows one of Tim’s processed BMR magnetic maps of Australia. His main lineaments are marked on the slide. This work was, and remains to some, controversial but, without Tim O’Driscoll’s lineaments, I doubt that Olympic Dam would be a mine today. He noted along the way that many of Australia’s big mineral deposits lay on these lineaments and actually, more often than not, lay where they crossed one another. This is Kalgoorlie and here we have Kambalda. The famous giant Kalgoorlie gold system, for example, sits where these two lineaments cross one another. Another member of the team was Doug Haynes; he had done a PhD at the Australian National University. He research topic centred on what sourced the copper in large copper deposits. Based on his PhD research, he developed a sediment-hosted copper exploration model that led to WMC’s copper exploration program to focus on areas of South Australia underlain by particular basic igneous rocks: the copper source rocks that were an important element of the search model and of Doug’s PhD thesis. One such area of known copper mineralisation was at Mount Gunson, well south of Olympic Dam. At Mount Gunson, beneath the known mineralisation, in the BMR’s regional geophysical data sets there was an area with coincident gravity and magnetic anomalies that was interpreted to be Doug’s copper source rocks - basic igneous rocks. Interestingly, Mount Gunson also lay at the intersection of two of Tim O’Driscoll’s lineaments. Another member of the WMC team, geophysicist Hugh Rutter, had identified from BMR’s regional magnetic and gravity maps some other areas of coincident magnetic and gravity anomalism well north of Mount Gunson and these were refined as drilling targets, using Tim O’Driscoll’s lineaments. 博士尼尔 · 威廉姆斯在这张幻灯片，我们看到这些特殊的地貌 — — 事实上这两个交叉奥林匹克坝随后被发现的地方。我已经读过跨一个引人入胜的故事，我相信，更多可以告诉。有趣的是对我来说，在奥林匹克坝，我们现在知道矿化的体在这个方向 — — 蒂姆 · 奥德地貌之一一样散开。这表明强的结构控制在此的特大型金矿床的位置上，我认为它给蒂姆在一起放回在 1970 年代的想法的额外支持。这是现代图像的区域磁和重力数据，涵盖奥林匹克坝地区。磁学在左边和重力是在右边，和小的微弱白色圆圈显示奥林匹克坝的位置。看着这两个图像后，你可能会问: '好，WMC 为什么钻他们在那里?答案是: '记住地貌'。我想要现在做的点是这些数据都可通过对任何人有兴趣探索 m 老 BMR

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主题演讲，发现下一代的矿产资源有什么问题？威廉姆斯尼尔博士，我相信你们都是被炒了，想在澳大利亚寻找新的资源。为了帮助你开始，我会在我的演讲中向你提出挑战，仔细想想我们应该问的是什么问题。在1946，在二战结束的时候，伟大的澳大利亚地质学家哈罗德爵士拉加特说服当时的联邦政府在堪培拉设立国家地质调查。它被称为矿产资源局（BMR）和时间就演变成了澳大利亚地球科学（GA）。对于政府决定建立的基础是BMR哈罗德爵士拉加特的愿景，随着良好的区域地质和地球物理图，工业将能够发现新的矿产财富，澳大利亚将有一天是一个非常富裕的国家，由于大量的矿产资源。我要展示的动画展示先生哈罗德拉加特的愿景已经实现。动画实际上是由菲尔麦克法登当他是GA的首席科学家，这表明矿物的发现每年从年1946到2001。你会看到一个红色的佛罗里达州火山灰时，有一个发现，然后，红色的闪光会崩溃回到一个小圆圈，这将保持。非常重要的是，在左手边，以美元，你会看到澳大利亚的矿产出口收入。你会看到他们是非常令人印象深刻的。
是菲尔更新动画，你会看到两件事。首先，你会看到，现在的矿产出口量约为750亿美元，因此它确实是澳大利亚经济的一个非常非常重要的部分。其次，你会注意到，如果你有一个好的眼睛或菲尔放慢动画下来，该矿床的发现速度正在放缓。在过去的几年里，我们已经看到了矿产生产的巨大增长，但这已经从现有矿的加速生产到了，从棕地勘探在邻近的已知矿化并从提高效率和采矿和加工效率创新。但我们在该地区有一个问题。这些都是你在建新的矿产省的探索，新矿山和新城镇的活动，维持行业的长期健康和财富。这一期的减缓绿地在澳大利亚的成功下一直困扰。它肯定涉及澳大利亚政府以及国家和地区政府。多年来一直有几个查询到与绿地探索的问题是什么。一个更好地了解查询是Prosser查询，这是在堪培拉由众议院进行。像许多其他的报告，它突出的大问题，这就是这里所说的：“…还“未知”的世界级矿床最有可能隐藏在贫瘠的土壤或贫瘠的覆岩序列。这是挑战，还是挑战的一个很好的例子，对于你们所有的人，但我的思想，它是一个令人兴奋的，智力上的刺激和经济上的奖励挑战。这张幻灯片显示了巴克利高原西北部的Mount Isa的黑土平原。最近的地区区域露头的地方我拍下了这张照片的点构成的一个最富饶的铅锌矿化的地壳部分。很有可能，下面的某个地方这些巨大的、毫无特色的黑土平原，大型铅锌矿床将潜伏，等待着被发现。问题是：我们能找到他们吗？作为一名前矿物探险家和乐观主义者，我的观点是，我们当然可以-是的，我们可以，”其他人最近说。但最大的挑战是真的，我们如何去做呢？我们知道，我们正在做的，在探索中，正在开始失败，因此，我们需要考虑超越目前的探索“范式”：我们需要思考超越广场，并以不同的方式去探索，我们如何从现在开始，我们将从现在开始的“表面探索”。威廉姆斯尼尔博士让我们从昆士兰西北部到另一个同样平坦的澳大利亚。这张幻灯片显示周围的景观麦拉附近著名的旧火箭射程在中南部澳大利亚。一个我很看好矿产勘查未来在澳大利亚的原因是基于什么已经在Woomera地区勘探取得。我长大了，在奥尔伯里，新南威尔士州，景观，在幻灯片上看到你被称为“超越”的背后。它有许多其他的名字，很少有人喜欢。然而，对于所有的问题，不管是在澳大利亚还是在世界各地，这个地方是，或者应该是，一个伟大的奇迹因为潜伏350米以下的沙漠表面，在羊站叫Roxby丘陵，坐在世界上最大的已知矿床之一：超大型奥林匹克坝矿床。奥运大坝在1975被发现，然后西方矿业公司。发现奥林匹克坝是由澳大利亚矿产资源管理器Roy Woodall WMC团队。我们有幸在今天与我们一起在这里和我们一起。罗伊是一个传奇人物，在世界矿产勘查。我希望你们所有人都有机会和罗伊交谈，因为如果有一个人在广场上思考，并问正确的问题，挑战他的员工，那就是罗伊。奥林匹克坝是现在拥有和经营的必和必拓，在已有资源的基础上，现在是名列世界第四大铜矿，世界上最大的铀矿和世界第五大金矿--所有的一个矿床。它是真正的巨人之间的巨人。当你还记得我们还不知道奥运会是多么大的时候，这一切都会让你印象深刻。此外，存款是一种矿化，是以前未知的，现在一般称为铁氧化物铜金矿床。我不喜欢这个词，我认为它值得它自己的名字：它是一个奥林匹克坝型矿床，因为它的巨大的规模和独特性。奥林匹克坝发生在基底岩石350米相对FL在撒谎，比1.6-billion-year-old岩举办年轻十亿岁的盖层沉积矿床。奥林匹克坝的发现提供了一些精彩的见解如何，我们可能会对未来的深入探索，所以让我们如何去找到WMC存款的快速查找。在我的小时候，我不能完全正义的发现，但我会尝试捕捉的关键要素的发现。威廉姆斯尼尔博士的41个想法，导致发现是由一个具有不同专业知识的团队开发的。这个团队的成员之一是构造地质学家，提姆该，谁发现，如果你仔细分析了BMR的国家尺度的地球物理的地图，你可以看到长的线性特征周游全国。这张幻灯片显示了提姆的一个加工BMR磁澳大利亚地图。其主要特征是在滑动的标记。这项工作，并保持一定，但没有争议，提姆O’Driscoll的轮廓线，我怀疑奥林匹克大坝将我的今天。他指出，澳大利亚的许多大型矿床躺在这些线和实际的方式，往往不是躺在那里他们跨越了一个又一个。这是卡尔和我们这里的卡姆巴尔达。著名的巨型卡尔金制度，例如，坐在这两线彼此交叉。球队的另一个成员是海恩斯道格；他曾在澳大利亚国立大学做过博士学位。他的研究主题集中于大型铜矿中的铜。基于他的博士研究，他发展了一种沉积岩型铜矿的勘查模式导致了WMC的铜勘探计划的重点南澳大利亚在特定的基性火成岩：铜源岩是搜索模型和道格博士论文的重要元素。已知铜矿化，其中的一个区域是在安装冈森，奥林匹克坝的南。在山下的冈森，已知矿化，在基础代谢率的区域地球物理数据集有一致的重力和磁异常被解释为道格的铜源岩-基性火成岩区。有趣的是，安装冈森也躺在两个提姆该的轮廓线的交叉口。公司的另一个成员，地球物理学家休米拉特，从基础代谢率的区域重磁图一致的磁场和重力异常以及北山冈森和这些精致的钻探目标的其他一些地区发现，使用提姆O'Driscoll的轮廓。
博士尼尔威廉姆斯在幻灯片上我们看到这些特殊的地貌–，事实上这两个交叉在奥林匹克坝随后被发现。我已经浏览过一个精彩的故事，我相信有更多的人可以告诉我。有趣的是，对我来说，在奥林匹克坝，我们现在知道，矿化体串在这个方向–一样提姆O'Driscoll的轮廓。这表明一个强大的结构控制对这个巨型矿床的位置，我认为这给思想更多的支持，提姆放在一起，早在上世纪70年代。这是一个现代的区域重磁数据覆盖奥林匹克坝地区形象。磁学在左边，重力是正确的，和小晕的白圈显示了奥运会的位置。你可能会问，看后两图像：“嗯，为什么WMC钻他们在哪里？的答案是：“记得线”。我要指出现在的情况是，这些数据可通过老BMR谁是在探索我感兴趣的