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The metamorphic basement, or granodiorites, and shear zone rocks of D'entrecasteaux Island in Papua New Guinea show a rapid cooling of the orogenic belt. Active extension at the western end of the propagating Woodlark Basin leads to the formation of metamorphic core complexes. A thermochronologic study reveals that the gneisses found in the core of the dome is cooling rapidly and that the retrogression of the metamorphic basement movement on the outer shear zone coincides with emplacement of granodiorites. This has resulted in the formation and the unroofing of the domes in the north-south directed extension of the region.

An important step in mineral resource estimation process is the grouping of drill hole samples into domains that reflect zones of homogeneous properties for accurate grade estimation and practical exploitation purposes. In practice, this challenging task is performed through a subjective, time-consuming manual interpretation of the mineral deposit. Therefore, various interpretations are possible. The definition of domains can be viewed as a clustering problem consisting of grouping samples into clusters, herein called domains, so that samples belonging to the same cluster are more similar than those in different clusters. Several methods exist for this purpose; however, groups of samples created through traditional clustering tend to show poor spatial contiguity. Alternatively, spatially contiguous clusters can be obtained through geostatistical clustering where the spatial dependency between samples is considered. This paper is devoted to the application of geostatistical clustering to support domaining of an iron ore deposit located in Western Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]