P1336 Global Basins Project

Project Number: P1336

Status: In Development: Expression of Interest

Project manager: Dr Anil Subramanya

The Global Basins Project is an ambitious initiative designed to close the significant knowledge gap in the exploration of sedimentary basins for critical minerals required for the energy transition and CO2 emission reduction targets. Despite sediment-hosted stratiform copper (SSC) deposits, located in sedimentary basins, accounting for 20% of global copper production, these basins have been underexplored over the last 2-3 decades.

To address this issue, the project aims to initiate a systematic, globally connected, multidisciplinary study of basin metallogeny to ensure a productive and sustainable future. The project seeks to drive a transformative shift in Earth Sciences knowledge and methodologies pertinent to mineral exploration within sedimentary basins. This will be achieved through the creation of a series of regional hubs responsible for local basin research and data, knowledge, and expertise aggregation and sharing.

Benefiting from recent advancements in information technology for data acquisition, storage, and analysis, the project plans to integrate existing multidisciplinary data related to multiscale basin evolution to identify global and local knowledge gaps. The Global Basins Project also aims to harmonize and integrate local datasets through web-based services within a common geospatial framework, following the FAIR principles – Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse.

By fostering multilateral exchange and collaboration between the hubs, the project will facilitate a comprehensive understanding of basins from the viewpoint of metallogeny. It aims to determine how the basin evolved with respect to diagenesis and fluid composition, when major geological events that may have triggered fluid movement occurred, and what exploration strategies would be effective for deposit discovery.

For more information, please contact GM Australasia/VP Geosciences Dr Anil Subramanya anil.subramanya

Researchers

Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia