The Coompana Province is located between the western Gawler Craton to the east, the Musgrave Province to the North and the Madura Province to the west, straddling the South Australian Western Australian border. The region is completely covered by Neoproterozoic to Cenozoic sediments of the Officer, Denman, Bight and Eucla basins. There are no known basement exposures and only ~12 existing drillholes that intersect basement in the region. Because of these factors the geology and mineral prospectivity of the region is largely unknown.

The GSSA and our project partners are committed to leading scientific understanding and driving discovery beneath post-mineralisation cover in South Australia through pre-competitive data capture and knowledge value-add, aligned with the objectives set out in the National Mineral Exploration Strategy and the UNCOVER Initiative.

The staged pre-competitive geoscience data acquisition workflow for the far west of South Australia included:

• The deep crustal seismic and magnetotelluric profile 13GA-EG1 (Eucla Gawler seismic line). A collaborative project between the GSSA, GA, The Geological Survey of Western Australia and AuSCOPE
• The Coompana airborne magnetic and radiometric survey
• The Coompana regional 2, 1 and 0.5 km gravity survey
• The Coompana pre-drilling geophysical characterisation of the cover using a combination of magnetic modelling, audio magnetotellurics, passive seismic, reflection seismic and micro-gravity in collaboration with GA and the CSIRO
• Completion of the regional AusLAMP magnetotelluric grid over the west of South Australia
• A regional regolith and landform map, together with a soil and vegetation geochemistry survey conducted in collaboration with the CSIRO
• The Coompana Drilling Project, drilling eight new stratigraphic holes into the basement of the Coompana Province