Promotional flyer showing the proposed gazettal blocks of the 2017 offshore acreage release and providing releavnt geoscientific and administrative information.

Promotional flyer showing the proposed gazettal blocks of the 2017 offshore acreage release and providing releavnt geoscientific and administrative information.

Promotional flyer showing the proposed gazettal blocks of the 2016 offshore acreage release and providing releavnt geoscientific and administrative information.

Here we report on the results of a study undertaken in the Flinders Commonwealth Marine Reserve (southeast Australia) designed to test the benefits of two approaches to characterising shelf habitats: (i) MBES mapping of a continuous (~30 km2) area selected on the basis of its potential to include a range of representative seabed habitats , versus; (ii) a novel approach that uses targeted mapping of a greater number of smaller, but spatially balanced, locations using a Generalized Random Tessellation Stratified sample design. We present the first quantitative estimates of habitat type on the shelf of the Flinders reserve, using both survey approaches, based on three MBES analysis techniques. We contrast the quality of information that both survey approaches offer in combination with the three MBES analysis methods. We then consider the implications for future inventory of benthic habitats in shelf environments in the context of monitoring extensive offshore marine reserves.

Discusses requirements of a stratigraphic unit definition and why geoscientists should write more of them, where to research background information, where to get advice, and what standards apply.

Large tsunami occur infrequently but have the capacity to cause enormous numbers of casualties, damages to the built environment, critical infrastructure, and economic losses. A sound understanding of tsunami hazard is required to underpin management of these risks, and while tsunami hazard assessments are typically conducted at regional or local scales, globally consistent assessments are required to support international disaster risk reduction eorts. This study presents a global scale probabilistic tsunami hazard assessment (PTHA), extending previous global scale assessments based largely on scenario analysis. Only earth- quake sources are considered, representing about 80% of damaging tsunami events. Globally extensive estimates of tsunami runup height are derived at various exceedance rates, and the associated uncertainties are quantied. Epistemic uncertainties in the exceedance rates of large earthquakes often lead to large uncertainties in the tsunami runup. Deviations be- tween the modelled tsunami runup and event observations are quantied, and found to be larger than suggested in previous studies. Accounting for these deviations in the PTHA is important, as it leads to a strong increase in predicted tsunami runup for a given exceedance rate.

Can you help the Geoscience Australia Library? We are seeking the field notebooks of any geologists who worked for the Bureau of Mineral Resources (BMR) in Antarctica, especially those from the 1950s-80s, to include in our digitisation project. Tucked away in archive boxes in the basement compactus of the Geoscience Australia Library in Canberra, lie over 3500 geol ogical field notebooks. These notebooks contain the observations of BMR geologists from the 1940s onwards as they worked their way across Australia, parts of Papua New Guinea and Pakistan, and the Australian Antarctic Territory. Around 100 Antarctic field notebooks are the focus of a pilot digitisation project to improve access to the rich data they contain and ensure they are preserved for future generations to use.

Poster about the Woolshed Creek fossil site discovered by W.B. Clarke in 1844 now being rehabilitated as a geological heritage site, after Madura Parkway roadworks.