Associate Professor Caroline Tiddy

Excludes commercial-in-confidence projects.

Other projects

Geochemical tools for mineral exploration

This project aims to develop data-driven geochemical exploration tools that demonstrably increase the geochemical footprint of mineral occurrences.  Efforts have thus far concentrated on iron oxide-copper-gold mineralisation within South Australia, and use innovative approaches of sampling for specific mineral phases, cover sequence rock types and vegetation, and utilise extensive geochemical datasets that have been and will routinely be collected by the mineral exploration industry. This research is being extended to include additional mineral phases, rock and vegetation types that may host key indicator elements, as well as additional commodities, including Pb-Zn-Ag (sedimentary exhalative) and Cu-Zn-Pb-Ag-Au (volcanic massive sulphide) deposits in the Adelaide Hills, South Australia, Tennant Creek Cu-Au-Bi and basinal Cu-Au in the Northern Territory/Queensland and base metal mineral systems in the Cobar area of New South Wales.  The aim is to develop a series of data-drive geochemical criteria that utilises multiple sample media (mineral phases, rock types, vegetation), historic datasets and data acquired in future geochemical sampling campaigns and that can be applied in exploration for multiple commodity types. This project is being undertaken within MinEx CRC Program 3:https://minexcrc.com.au/program-three-national-drilling-initiative/

Real-time downhole assay

This project aims to develop real-time downhole analytical technique(s) that will remove the reliance on materials returned from drilling, will have a small surface footprint and will be inexpesive to operate.  The sensor(s) developed will either be deployed by the driller or will be automated within the drilling process.  This will allow informed decisions to be made during a drilling campaign. This project is being undertaken within MinEx CRC Project 3: https://minexcrc.com.au/program-two-data-from-drilling/project-3-real-time-downhole-assay/

Postgraduate opportunities

Opportunities for postgrdaute research exist within the above two MinEx CRC projects.  Go to https://minexcrc.com.au/education/education-program-2/ and download the postgraduate booklet to see the student research projects on offer.

Careers in geosciences

This cross-disciplinary project aims to understand the enablers and challenges of women attaining leadership levels within the academic, government and industry sectors of geosciences.  This project is being undertaken in collaboration with colleagues in UniSA's School of Management.  We hope to be able to understand these enablers and challenges to develop opportunities for current and future geoscientists and encourage diversity within decision-making levels.

Education through virtual reality

Working with colleagues in the Future Industries Institute, School of NBE and Project LIVE, I am developing modules for education of high school and university students in areas of geoscience that are otherwise difficult, if not impossible, to experience by a student body.  We are particularly developing modules that will allow students to experience being on various drilling sites (e.g. diamond drilling, new technology coil-tubing drilling sites) that they would not be able to visit in their normal course of study due to safety and the remote location of most drill sites. 

Research outputs for the last seven years are shown below. To see earlier years visit ORCID, ResearcherID or Scopus

Open access indicates that an output is open access.

Highlights

Journal Articles

Conferences

Other outputs

MOD. Blog

https://mod.org.au/2019/02/21/whats-in-our-dust/

This is a quirky and fun project that I did with UniSA's MOD. museum looking at whether we could detect the presence of extra-terrestrial material within samples collected from the top of the buiilding that hosts MOD.

We all need metals - we wouldn't be looking at this website if we didn't have them as they are in our laptops, mobile phones, in the seat we are sitting on.  This means we need mines so that we can extract metals.  This also means that metals are in demand... and this demand is increasing as we move into a world that has high demand of technologies and within which new technologies such as renewable energies are being developed.

My research priorities and passions lie in addressing the global issue of decreasing rates of discovery of mineral resources whilst also developing more environmentally friendly methods of mineral exploration.  I am addressing this problem by directing my research into developing new geochemical tools and drilling technologies for mineral exploration.  This research is aligned with the MinEx CRC since mid-2018, and prior to then the Deep Exploration Technologies Corporative Research Centre (DET CRC).

I envisage my future research agenda as undertaking applied research into improving exploration and processing techniques across the minerals industry value chain to decrease the risk of targeting and to improve our ability to exploit known resources.  This requires collaborative research between industry and academia and includes focus on processes of geochemical dispersion through integration of currently available and new geological datasets, and integration into exploration criteria and minerals processing.