Councillor Mel Lintern (2016-2017)
Mel Lintern
Current activities
Dr Mel Lintern is a research geochemist for CSIRO Mineral Resources in Australia. His expertise lies in the application of geochemistry, including biological media and calcrete (a common soil component in arid Australia) for mineral exploration.
Dr Lintern's research is enabling mining companies to explore with more confidence when tackling greenfield areas where sedimentary cover dominates, particularly in arid and semi-arid regions of Australia.
Since 2002, at least two large mines have opened (Tropicana and Challenger) as a result of using Dr Lintern’s calcrete research for exploration; the gold from these mines alone equates to over A$12 billion dollars.
He is currently leading projects on laser ablation, biogeochemistry, environmental geochemistry and calcrete geochemistry. He is passionate about geochemistry and is keen to promote its use to exploration companies and the community at large.
Background
Dr Lintern joined CSIRO in 1980 and has since achieved numerous scientific breakthroughs that have had a direct impact on mineral exploration.
He has translated the science of biogeochemistry, gold's mobility in the surficial environment and how abiotic-biotic geochemical anomalies form into robust mineral exploration tools used by industry to find new mineral deposits.
In the last ten years, Dr Lintern has led a number of large, multi-client externally-funded projects involving more than 40 domestic and international exploration companies, geological surveys and academic institutions. Academic qualifications
Dr Lintern holds the following qualifications:
- PhD Applied Geology
- Graduate Diploma in Environmental Science
- Bachelor of Science (Zoology)
Achievements
Dr Lintern’s research has demonstrated that vegetation creates detectable surficial geochemical anomalies in calcrete, even where there are significant thicknesses of transported cover such as sand dunes. With others he found tiny gold nuggets precipitated inside gum leaves showing that deep rooted plants can uptake and precipitate gold and thereby create geochemical anomalies for exploration.
He discovered that gold occurs in both ionic and metallic forms within calcrete, which has helped explain the chemical mobility of gold in soil and allows partial extraction analysis to be confidently applied by mineral explorers to detect mobile surficial gold anomalies.