Controls on, Expressions of and Discovery Potential for Gold Mineralization in the Central-Eastern Yilgarn Craton, Western Australia: New Insights from an Integrated Targeting Study

Here we present the results of an integrated targeting study covering the central-eastern Archean Yilgarn Craton of Western Australia, a region that is known for its substantial gold endowment of >40 Moz Au. The cornerstones of our study included custom built geophysical and remote sensing targeting tools, a new lithostructural interpretation of the area, a new targeting model structured according to the mineral systems approach, and a best practice approach to mineral potential modeling (MPM) that involved the use of five complimentary modeling techniques. The geophysical targeting tools served to identify proximity, association and abundance relationships between gold mineralization and gravity ridges ± edges as well as 95th percentile K/Th radiometric and remotely sensed goethite-clay-iron feature depth index ratio anomalies. The lithostructural interpretation unraveled structural trends that are oblique, or orthogonal, to the NNW-SSE-striking greenstone belts and likely represent important structural controls on the location of gold mineralization. Fry analysis, a method used to analyze the spatial distribution of geological point patterns, revealed similar directions of maximum gold occurrence alignment. Together, these new observations served as excellent predictors of gold prospectivity in the MPM component of this targeting study. The MPM not only identified most of the known gold occurrences but also several areas of gold potential that are underexplored. The highest priority MPM targets represent an order of magnitude reduction of the search space, the hallmark of a well-performing, practically useful targeting technique.