Automated lineament analysis of the Gairdner Dolerite dyke swarm of the Gawler Craton

In extensively covered regions, such as the Gawler Craton, understanding crustal architecture and the relation between geological structures, lithologies and mineral systems is dependent upon remote-sensed data, such as aeromagnetics. However, the large-scale interpretation of geophysical datasets can be time consuming and subjective. In 2019–20 an innovative collaborative project between the Geological Survey of South Australia and CSIRO, aiming to link basement lineaments with surface lineaments (González-Álvarez et al. 2020), resulted in the development of an automated lineament extraction and analysis workflow by Kelka and Martínez (2019). This methodology was applied successfully to an area in the central Gawler Craton (González-Álvarez et al. 2020; Kelka and Martínez 2019). This process allows the automatic generation of lineaments across large datasets in a time and cost-efficient way. Importantly, the generated lineament dataset includes derivative data, such as line length, orientation and line density, which can be used to analyse the data more objectively and statistically compare populations.

Despite the potential value of automated lineament generation, there has been little work comparing the product derived from this innovative process against manual observations...