FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[JesseKoz]

Going through the forum I wasn't sure on the best location for providing web resources, so I thought off-topic should work.

AGSON is the Australian Geological Survey Organisations Network, recently renamed from previous AusGIN, and their web portal has been a very useful tool for me over the years. It provides an interactive map with overlays of Australian government geoscience data. It requires no membership and all data is freely available. As I cannot post the link, google 'Portal AGSON Geoscience' and look for the AGSON Geoscience Portal. The link should end in an Australian government address gov au.

I'll give some examples of the kind of data available and how to use the web portal.

Adding data is as simple as clicking the 'Add Data' button on the top-left menu. Then within the 'Featured Data' tab you will have a list of the data overlays available. The portal allows for multiple layers of data. Let's say we want to see province contact and lithographic data. Expand 'Geological Provinces', expand 'Province Contacts' and add this data to the map. Now expand 'Geological Maps', expand 'Geological units (lithostratigraphy) and add this data to the map. Scanned 250k geological maps can be found under Geological Maps with links to the government 250k survey maps covering all of Australia. Very handy resource. Finally, and possibly the most relevant to this forum is the 'Mineral Occurrences and Resources' section, where you can search for a particular commodity and add known locality data to the map.