Plants sampled by Cooperative Research Centre for Landscape Environments and Mineral Exploration (LEME) PhD student Michael Neimanis and his supervisor, Dr Steve Hill (University of Adelaide), have successfully expressed uranium mineralisation over known deposits in South Australia’s Curnamona Province.

As part of his PhD project, Michael sampled a selection of native plants species over the known Gould’s Dam, Armchair, Radium Ridge, Streitberg, Gunsight, No. 6 Mine and Four Mile Creek uranium prospects in early 2006.

The sample sites were specifically selected because they represented a range of uranium mineralisation styles buried at different depths in the region. 

Uranium concentrations varied from site to site and species to species with the highest concentration of uranium recorded, 6.59 parts per million (ppm), in a curly mallee (Eucalyptus gillii) at the Radium Ridge Prospect.

“The next phase of my project, which will involve Heathgate Resources and Quasar Resources, will focus on a particular suite of species such as river red gums and the inland tea-tree, and plant biogeochemical and regolith geochemical sampling,” Michael said.

“I’m particularly interested in finding out which plant organs store the most uranium and working out why this happens.”

Michael’s PhD project is one example of how LEME is helping explorers develop new techniques to search for minerals in the blanket of soil, sediment and weathered rock that covers much of Australia known as regolith.