On Friday 4th September, a group of PESA members arrived at lunchtime to the NT Core Library in Alice Springs to participate in a fieldtrip to the Amadeus Basin organised by PESA WA and open to members of PESA from all branches. We were also strongly supported by the NT Geological Survey and by Peter Haines from the WA Geological Survey, who led the fieldtrip. A total of 19 geologists, geophysicists and engineers came along from Queensland, Adelaide and NT and of course WA.
Image above: From left to right back: Charlie Verdel, Antoine Dillinger, Jeremy Prosser, Ralph Youie, Peter Haines, Chemseddine Nahal, Damien Kelly, Reuben Hansman, Emma Jager, Toby Colson, Nick White, Ivana Gear and Martin Nagel. From front left to right front: Lisa McCarthy, Fiona Burns, Nik Sykiotis, Marion Croft and Sarah Wright.
We kicked off the trip with a session in the core store, where Peter Haines introduced us to the Amadeus Basin Neoproterozoic to Devonian stratigraphy. Charlie Verdel and Nick White then walked us through their infamous “Hall of Fame” core trays and samples. This included salt deposits from the Gillen, stromatolites from the Loves Creek, diamactites from the Areyonga, sandstones from the Arumbera, stromatolites from the Goyder, Rusophycus trace fossils from the Pacoota and trilobites form the Horn Valley and Stairway. Peter Haines also walked us through the amazing slabs of Pacoota Sandstone outside the NT Core Library building which revealed amazing examples of the Rusophycus trace fossils on giant slabs rescued from a nearby quarry.
This was followed by a walk-through approx. 1.5km of cores from various wells drilled in the area from the 1960’s to 2010 which included sections through the Arumbera, Goyder, Pacoota and Stairway Sandstones. Fiona Burns, who has been working with subsurface data in the basin for 2 years with Task Fronterra, described the facies and ichnology of the Temple Vale-1 cores, a Mereenie well core, and a Dingo Field core.
That evening, we all headed to Alice Springs brewery for happy hour and pizza. We started our field day at 7am where we all headed to Ellery creek to view the lower Tonian Heavitree Formation. We then tried and eventually succeeded in accessing the Pacoota type section, up a dry creek bed, after some sand issues for the vehicle and also the bus! We say some spectacular Rusophycus traces along bedding planes and amazing examples of “pipe rock” Skolithos.
The Day 2, we returned to Ellery Creek, where we were blown away by the most spectacular examples of laminar and domal stromatolites from the Loves Creek Formation. We also say some a distinctive carbonate outcrop known as ‘Dalmatian rock’ and the deposits of the Areyonga diamictites.
On Sunday evening, Charlie organised a pub crawl starting at the infamous Todd Tavern and ending at the Juicy Rump, resulting in a very slow start on Monday morning. Fiona Burns led a discussion on the cores once again but this time we looked in detail at the Tent Hill cores as well as a core from the Palm Valley Field, which both intersect the Pacoota Sandstone. That concluded the trip for 2026, with many requesting the location of our PESA WA trip for next year! Many thanks to Peter Haines and the NT Geological Survey for volunteering so much of their time and energy into making this such a success. We also want to thank you to Jess Latimer who ran us through HyLogger data and the app and how to make it more accessible to industry. And finally thanks to everyone for attending.
