We are excited to invite you to the next seminar of the 2025 Geology and Geophysics Seminar Series, featuring Mark Hoggard, who is a DECRA fellow in Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University. Mark will be presenting on “Australia’s lithospheric architecture and its influence on base metal mineralisation at Mt Isa“. In this engaging talk, he will present on how variations in lithospheric structure have shaped basin evolution, heat flow, and the timing of major sediment-hosted base metal deposits in northern Australia.
Date: November 19, 2025
Time: 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m., Sydney Time
Location: Room 449 (Conference Room), Madsen Building (F09), School of Geosciences
or Online (Join via zoom)
We look forward to seeing you there in person or joining us online!
https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84404501899?from=addon
Australia’s lithospheric architecture and its influence on base metal mineralisation at Mt Isa
Abstract
The lithosphere plays a fundamental role in modulating surface processes and controlling the distribution of many natural resources. Growing appreciation of this fact across academia, government and industry is spurring collaborative development of increasingly more robust and higher resolved models of the Australian upper mantle. Here, I will report on progress from a collaboration between ANU and Geoscience Australia towards this endeavour. The talk will cover compilation of extensive mantle xenolith inventories, probabilistic inference of paleogeothermal structure, calibration of anelastic conversions between temperature and seismic velocities, and continental-scale seismometer deployments for tomographic imaging. Our latest physics-informed models of temperature variations throughout the crust and upper mantle shed new light on various geodynamic aspects including the distribution of volcanism, seismicity, surface heat flow, mantle metasomatism, and mineral prospectivity. Using a case study from the Carpentaria Zinc Belt of northern Australia, I will demonstrate how lithospheric architecture has controlled the geodynamic development of sedimenatry basins in this region and controlled the timing of sediment-hosted base metal mineralisation at important deposits including McArthur River and Mount Isa.
Graphical Abstract
