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The Hidden Giants Beneath New South Wales

For centuries, the rolling farmlands of New South Wales seemed peaceful and ordinary. But far beneath the soil, sealed away under hundreds of millions of years of rock and sediment, lay a secret of staggering scale — one that modern science has only just revealed:
the remains of two ancient supervolcanoes, silent for nearly 290 million years, whose eruptions once reshaped an entire continent.

A Cataclysm in the Early Permian

These massive volcanic structures lie buried within the Sydney Basin, preserved in a way that is extremely rare. They were active in the early Permian Period, long before dinosaurs walked the Earth.
At that time, central New South Wales was a geological battlefield. Eruptions reached Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) 7 or higher — the level of a supervolcano — ejecting hundreds of cubic kilometres of ash and lava into the atmosphere.
When the eruptions ended, the land was blanketed with thick layers of volcanic ash, ignimbrite, and tuff. Over millions of years, weathering, ancient inland seas, and swamp forests buried the landscape under sediment and peat, eventually forming the coal seams known today. All surface traces of the volcanoes vanished.

Lost and Forgotten for 290 Million Years

The ancient calderas lay hidden near Rylstone and Lue for almost three centuries of human exploration. Their first hints emerged in the late 1980s, when CRA/Rio Tinto prospectors found traces of gold, silver, and copper in creeks.
While that discovery led to the Bowdens Silver deposit — now Australia’s largest undeveloped silver resource, with 396 million ounces — a strange geological anomaly upstream remained unexplained.

Uncovering the Rylstone Volcanic Chain

In 2023, Silver Mines Limited launched a major investigation using modern geoscience techniques:

The data revealed clear ring-shaped depressions and fault patterns — the unmistakable footprints of collapsed volcanic calderas. At least five ancient volcanoes of the Rylstone Volcanic Chain were identified.
The two most intact are:

Barra Creek Caldera – 4 × 4 km wide, heavily silicified and protected from erosion.
Three Hills Caldera – 3.5 × 3.5 km wide, covered by only 60–100 m of sediment, preserving steep walls and possibly remnants of lava domes or ancient crater lakes.

A Hidden Treasure Trove

Both calderas show signs of valuable mineralisation: quartz veins with pyrite, oxidised gossans, traces of gold and silver in creek sediments, and antimony — all markers of epithermal mineral systems. If they match Bowdens in richness, they could host large quantities of silver, gold, copper, zinc, and lead.

Why Scientists Are Excited

For geologists, these aren’t just potential mines — they are time capsules. The calderas offer a chance to study the complete life cycle of a supervolcano on the edge of the Lachlan Orogen, a key tectonic belt in eastern Australia’s history.
They may help scientists understand how massive volcanic systems form, collapse, and produce rich mineral deposits.

A Quiet Land Hiding a Violent Past

Today, the surface above these buried giants is calm: gum trees sway in the wind, cattle graze on open pastures, and creeks flow gently through the countryside.
Yet just a few kilometres below lies the fossilised heart of ancient cataclysms — explosions that once shook the land to its core. Now, after 290 million years of silence, these sleeping giants have returned to the world’s attention, holding both scientific secrets and untapped riches.