Geoscience Australia’s 3023 m salt hole: targeting insights for exploration teams
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on Australian Mining
30 Second Briefing
Geoscience Australia has drilled a 3023‑metre stratigraphic hole in the South Nicholson Basin, pushing national pre‑competitive geoscience to new depths in the hunt for salt and critical minerals. Core and downhole geophysics from the ultra‑deep bore will refine basin architecture, fluid pathways and evaporite distribution models that guide potash, lithium brine and sediment‑hosted base metal exploration. For miners and consultants, the dataset should tighten depth predictions, reduce drilling risk and sharpen targeting in underexplored central Australian basins.
Technical Brief
- Continuous core recovery enables detailed lithological, structural and alteration logging through previously unsampled basin intervals.
- Downhole geophysics (e.g. gamma, resistivity, sonic) were acquired to correlate physical properties with core stratigraphy.
- Data will calibrate regional seismic and potential-field interpretations, tightening depth conversion and basin architecture models.
- Hydrogeological information from the hole supports characterisation of deep fluid flow regimes and basin-scale brine plumbing.
- Results are intended to refine models for evaporite distribution and associated critical mineral systems across central Australia.
- Pre‑competitive datasets from this hole can de‑risk early‑stage targeting before miners commit to costly deep drilling.
- Scope is regional and stratigraphic; it does not provide deposit‑scale resource definition or geotechnical design parameters.
Our Take
In our mining coverage, Australia dominates the 'critical minerals' keyword set, signalling that Geoscience Australia's deeper drilling work is likely to feed directly into domestic supply‑security and onshoring debates rather than purely academic research.
Reaching over 3000 metres depth for salt and critical minerals suggests potential to de‑risk very deep sedimentary or basin‑hosted targets, which could open up new project concepts beyond the shallow brine and evaporite systems that most current salt operations rely on.
Among the 538 tag‑matched Projects/Research pieces, only a small subset involve such deep drill testing, so this programme will probably become a reference dataset for other Australian explorers calibrating geophysical models at depth for critical mineral targeting.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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