Craton- to deposit-scale targeting for orogenic gold mineralisation leading to discovery of a hypothetical Golden Mile under cover

[Extract] Introduction: The Kalgoorlie district of the Yilgarn Craton contains the world-class Golden Mile deposit, Mt Charlotte and several smaller gold deposits (Bateman and Hagemann, 2004; Bateman and Bierlein, 2007). This presentation describes targeting techniques that successfully simulate discovery of known gold deposits in the Yilgarn Craton of Western Australia, and applies these techniques to the discovery of a hypothetical Golden Mile located under several tens of metres of transported cover. The targeting techniques and their quantitative and qualitative efficiencies at locating known gold mineralisation are described in the Yilgarn Gold Targeting Atlas (YETA; Witt et al., 2014, in press), a collaboration between the Geological Survey of Western Australia and the Centre for Exploration Targeting, University of Western Australia, supported by in-kind assistance from several exploration and mining companies active in the Yilgarn Craton. The Atlas builds on early studies of gold prospectivity in the Yilgarn Craton by Knox-Robinson et al. (2000) and Czarnota et al. (2010) and, more recently, a major research project that addressed gold exploration targeting by pmd*CRC (summarised in Volume 183 of Precambrian Research). However, whereas these previous contributions emphasised the conceptual ("expert opinion") approach to targeting, the YETA publication takes a "data-driven" strategy that seeks to quantify the relationship between known gold and a range of geological features. Various targeting criteria tend to work best at certain scales (craton, terrane, district, deposit) and, in practice, the approach to gold exploration is generally dependent on the scale and stage of the targeting process (Hronsky and Groves, 2008; Cassidy, 2010). This scalar approach to targeting is adopted by the Atlas and in the present contribution