Live WA tenure and mine data, analysed: corporate control, ground coming open, 136 years of claim history, and an instant brief for any point you click.
Who controls the ground, when it was claimed, where it comes open — and what any point is worth.
Expiring ground is mostly 5-year exploration licences held by juniors — most renew; click any polygon for its holder. Mines and the commodity grid show today's picture.
Click a company to see it on its own; click again to show all.
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Data: WA DMIRS / SLIP live services (CC-BY 4.0) — 6,376 live tenements, 8,077 recorded mines & deposits, 60,399 historical (dead) tenements, refreshed on build.
Corporate control resolves registered holders to parent companies — each mapping verified against public records (e.g. FMG Pilbara + Chichester Metals → Fortescue; Hamersley Iron + Robe River JV (Rio 53%, operator) + Dampier Salt (Rio 68%) → Rio Tinto; Atlas Iron + Mulga Downs → Hancock; Wonmunna + Polaris + Kumina + Bungaroo South → Mineral Resources). Where parentage could not be verified (Cape Lambert Iron Associates) the registered JV name is shown ungrouped. Rankings count granted ground only — pending applications are excluded, since they aren't control yet and conversion applications would double-count ground a company already holds. Method matters: naive name-grouping crowns FMG; corporate grouping with applications crowns Fortescue; corporate grouping on granted ground — the defensible measure — crowns Rio Tinto. Where cyan (pending) sits on a company's own colour, that's ground being promoted from exploration to mining lease.
The time slider is a true reconstruction, not a filter of today's map: 65,076 parcels — every tenement granted since 1890, living and dead — each stamped with its alive interval from the DMIRS registers. Drag back and you see the tenure map as it actually stood. Click any historical parcel for its holder and fate.
Lapsed ground = tenements that expired, were surrendered or forfeited within the last 2 years (DMIRS "dead tenements" register) — defined parcels with a former holder and a death reason, the ground explorers watch for re-pegging. DMIRS's "release pending" register currently lists zero Pilbara parcels. For context, 82,367 km² of Pilbara land carries no tenement at all (ocean masked; parks/reserves/native-title not netted out). Open ground near mines = untenemented land within 10 km of an operating mine (8,168 km²) — the pegging shortlist. Areas computed in equal-area projection (EPSG:3577).
Site briefs are synthesised from every layer at the clicked point; figures are computed, prose is AI-assembled. The commodity grid shades each 0.2° cell by its dominant recorded commodity (opacity = number of recorded sites) — proven ground, not a prediction; a geology-weighted prospectivity model is in the works.