Reliable water availability is critical to sustaining community water supplies and determining economic development opportunities. In many cases, particularly in remote and arid areas such as in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in the far northwest of South Australia, groundwater is the only viable source of water. However, there is limited knowledge of the groundwater resources in these remote regions and the Musgrave Province, where the APY Lands is located, is no exception. Consequently, there is a need to identify and determine the potential of groundwater resources in regions – such as the APY Lands – to supplement their community water supplies and to provide water for sustainable economic development which leads to employment opportunities.
The Goyder Institute for Water Research’s Facilitating Long-term Outback Water Solutions (G-FLOWS) suite of research projects has developed new techniques to interpret airborne electromagnetic (AEM) geophysical data, coupled with hydrogeological techniques, to identify groundwater resources buried by deep sedimentary cover which is a major constraint to identifying water sources in the northern parts of South Australia.
In its third stage, G-FLOWS is utilising AEM data collected in 2016 to undertake a targeted program of data acquisition, interpretation and mapping of groundwater resources in the Musgrave Province. The research, a partnership between Department for Environment and Water, CSIRO, Flinders University and the Geological Survey of South Australia, is applying new and innovative geophysical and hydrogeological techniques developed in the previous G-FLOWS projects, combined with a variety of field evaluation techniques, to map the groundwater resources in the APY Lands.
The discovery of a new fresh groundwater resource (<1,000 mg/L) in the APY Lands has enormous potential for the future development of this remote region in outback South Australia. Availability of a high yielding groundwater resource within the Lindsay East Palaeovalley could unlock the potential for economic development in the region.