September-October 2024: Field work Zambia and SEG conference Namibia

The CODES group had an awesome trip over to Africa to attend the SEG conference in Namibia. Dave Cooke, Dave Selley and myself also had the amazing opportunity to do some field work in Zambia. We visited the First Quantum Minerals Trident Project (including the Sentinel and Enterprise deposits) in the western part of the Central African Copperbelt. We also visited the First Quantum Minerals exploration site in Ndola, where we looked at the amazing Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth glacial diamictites in the Fishtie drillcore. We visited KoBold’s Mingomba project up north near the border with the DRC. Overall, it was an amazing trip to see some pretty special rocks.

August 2024: DECRA announcement

Absolutley stoked to have been awarded an Australian Research Council DECRA fellowship. This provides three years of salary and project costs for me to undertake my dream project looking at the links between sediment-hosted ore deposits, plate tectonics and climate in deep time. The project seeks to address our urgent need for new discoveries of critical and strategic metals, especially Cu and Co. It’s the perfect amalgamation of my previous work looking at plate tectonic reconstructions of East Africa (PhD), global ore deposit databases (postdoc in Canada), and my recent work at CODES, UTAS looking at geochronology of ore deposits.

August 2024: Field trip to Old Pelion Copper Mine

I was lucky to have third year student Ariann Spencer Washbourne do a semester long research project with me. Her aim was to collect some galena samples from the Tyennan tectonic domain to do Pb isotope analysis. We undertook field work to the Old Pelion Copper Mine, one of very few occurrences of galena in the Tyennan domain. This involved an overnight hike into the New Pelion Hut, which is roughly the half way point along the famous Overland Track in the Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park. Stay tuned for an update on the data collected during this project!

June-July 2024: Third year mapping in North Tasmania

Had a great time helping run the third year mappping field trip to northern Tasmania with Rob Scott. Some fairly complicated but stunning poly-deformed rocks.

January 2024: Field work in northwest Tasmania with Mineral Resources Tasmania geoscientists

Ralph Bottrill, Grace Cumming and I headed out to northwest Tasmania to do some field work in the Rocky Cape Group. We collected samples for zircon analysis, with the aim of better constraining the stratigraphic age of some units in the Mesoproterozoic Rocky Cape Group.