Two significant Archaean cratons dominate Western Australia: Pilbara in the north and the Yilgarn in the south. These two cratons are linked by paleo- to neo-proterozoic basins and orogenic belts, including the Ashburton, Earaheady and Gascoyne. However, Western Australia's most productive district by far has been the Eastern Goldfields Province of the Yilgarn craton. This craton hosts not only some of the largest komatite and laterite nickel deposits in the world, such as Kambalda and Murrin Murrin, but also multiple giant to super-giant gold deposits, including:

• Kalgoorlie-Norseman District: 100 million plus ounces, including The Golden Mile (50 million ounces plus)
• Leonora Laverton District: 20 million ounces, including Sunrise Dam (10 million ounces) and Wallaby (7 million ounces)

Yilgarn Craton

Geologically, the Yilgarn is a composite of three major provinces, the Murchison, Southern Cross and Eastern Goldfields. There is ongoing debate regarding the tectono-stratigraphic processes that formed these belts and which may account for the large differences in the prospectivity of the three provinces. Australian Mineral Fields believes that the differences are due in large measure to the interaction between paleo-Archaean vertical tectonic processes as they changed to modern horizontal plate-tectonic process. The interaction appears to have played a critical role in the formation of the combination of structural and hydrothermal processes that have caused the development of these significant deposits. In addition, the Eastern Goldfields' lesser degree of erosion and metamorphic grade appears to have preserved and exposed that portion of the crust at which the ore forming processes were most effective.

Albany Fraser Province

Australian Mineral Fields is also well-advanced in investigating the potential prospectivity of other proterozoic belts where very few discoveries have been made to date. Of particular interest is the Albany Fraser Belt in the southeast of Western Australia, where AngloGold and Independence Group have recently identified significant intersections of gold mineralization as part of the Tropicana prospect.