Previous work by the SA government and CSIRO highlighted the value of integrating AEM data with other geological and hydrogeological data to model palaeovalley groundwater systems and develop regional hydrogeological conceptualisations. This allows better-informed water supply decisions and management for communities in remote parts of Australia where these systems provide the only available and long-term water resource. The Exploring for the Future Musgrave Palaeovalley module seeks to apply similar workflows across the western Musgrave Province and adjacent Officer and Canning basins.
Open file mineral exploration AEM data from 11 surveys in WA and SA flown between 2009 and 2012 were re-processed and inverted to produce conductivity models and a suite of derived datasets. Geoscience Australia’s Layered-Earth-Inversion was used as a single standard processing and inversion method to improve continuity and data quality.
These legacy AEM data, originally for mineral exploration, have been incorporated with DEM-derived landscape attributes, previous palaeovalley mapping and available bore lithologies to model palaeovalley base surfaces. This presentation will provide an example from four blocks of AEM data to show how repurposing data from mineral exploration, public bore data and landscape analysis can be used to identify palaeovalley systems which provide critical water supplies for remote and regional communities and industry.
This approach can be used to model palaeovalley systems from a range of geoscientific and other datasets. The Exploring for the Future Musgrave Palaeovalley module has acquired ~23,000 line km of AEM across parts of WA and the NT at line spacings of 1 and 5 km. This new precompetitive data will be used to model palaeovalley system geometry and integrate with new and existing AEM, drilling, landscape, groundwater chemistry and surface geophysics data to test hydrogeological conceptualisations of these groundwater systems.