One of Western Australia's biggest and most important industries is mining.
This industry has proved itself essential to the economic livelihood of both this state and the nation as a whole. The longevity of the mining industry rests on finding new mineral deposits and, unfortunately, no major mineral discoveries have been made in WA in more than 30 years.
New research, however, is hopefully giving the mining industry new insight into where and how to look for new sources of minerals. Professor Klaus Regenauer-Lieb who in 2005 was awarded a $1 million four-year Premier's Fellowship, is at the forefront of the field of mathematical geophysics and computational geodynamics, developing new ways of exploration and finding mineral deposits.
Spending his time between the CSIRO and UWA, his collaborative method is yielding results. Combining geology with geodynamics, the Professor's work involves looking back four billion years into the planet's history to understand where the earth's deposits of various valuable minerals were formed. This allows exploration companies to intelligently predict where to best look for a particular mineral. His work is exceedingly complicated with numerical codes often taking days to calculate even on the supercomputers around the world, but to this state's economic longevity his efforts are invaluable resources in themselves.
