Lithospheric evolution of the Yilgarn Craton

Western Australia’s Yilgarn Craton preserves over 4 billion years of Earth History. Using geophysics and geochemistry together, this project will attempt to unravel that history to aid mineral resource discovery.

Western Australia’s most endowed region for gold and nickel resources, the Yilgarn Craton formed during the Archean from older elements, but much modified during the Proterozoic and Phanerozoic.

The processes and timing of its formation is a source of some controversy, with several different models proposed, each with different implications for the generation of mineral resources.

In turn these form part of globally relevant models of lithosphere formation and the generation of minerals endowment.

As part of a large industry-linked initiative, this PhD project seeks to develop novel ways to use new geochemical, isotopic and geophysical data together to test existing models and to generate new ideas. These ideas will inform regional exploration in the region.

As part of this project the successful PhD applicant will:

• Devise novel workflows for integrated interpretation of geochemical, isotopic and geophysical data
• Using these, test several existing models for the evolution of the Yilgarn Craton lithosphere, characterizing their degree of fit to the above data
• Characterise differences in regions, in particular for regions well-endowed with deposits versus regions less well-endowed.