The Flying Hellfish provide Geoscience Australia with web portals of an unprecedented quality and impact. They have achieved this by embracing automation, digital culture and cloud to uplift Geoscience Australia's web portal presence to scale and meet the demands of the modern user. In 2014 these concepts were only ideas and experiments. However, since the team formed in 2016 they have been on a transformational journey towards a new way of working which has delivered radically better digital products than what was available at the outset. User experience is now at the forefront of our web portals, with the common look and feel providing a seamless experience across more than 15 digital products on any device (including smartphones). The security has been proven to be state-of-the-art, and the products are designed to be fast and responsive. In this presentation you will learn how the team utilises NoOps (the No Operations paradigm) to build, operate and support these products while continuing to quickly and efficiently deliver new and innovative digital products.

Earthquake hazard was not fully recognised in Australian building design until the mid-1990's. This oversight has resulted in a legacy of vulnerable buildings that can be readily damaged in moderate to severe Australian earthquakes. In particular, older unreinforced masonry buildings are particularly vulnerable and very common in the centres of our large cities and towns with significant heritage value. What can be done to cost-effectively address the risk they represent to people in the community and to protect these valued assets from future damaging earthquakes? With a focus on the Heritage town of York and the state capital of Melbourne, strategies have been examined as to effectiveness which have included a virtual retrofit to progressively reduce damage, injury, economic losses and emergency management logistics. Communication products derived from this work are described and initiatives to apply them in other Australian communities highlighted.

The presentation will introduce the basic components of the drone/UAV/RPAs, summarise the rules for operating a drone as part of a business or undertaking (including operating under a Remotely Piloted Aircraft Operators Certificate – ReOC) and present some of the science and scientists utilising RPAs for their work at Geoscience Australia and beyond. The talks will include environmental research in Antarctica, landscape analysis after large earthquakes, machine learning to spot dangerous sharks and validating satellite reflectance, all with the assistance of drones.

Australia, like the rest of the world, is forward looking and implementing a range of initiatives to support its transition to a lower carbon future. This presentation will focus on emerging energy resource commodities that have placed Australia on its path to a low carbon economy and how Geoscience Australia’s work program supports the industry’s adaptation to the required change in energy mix. Starting with an overview of Australia’s oil & gas exploration history, the talk will highlight the many significant discoveries, the remaining resource potential and the emergence of new energy resource commodities.

Satellite navigation is an important capability in our modern lives—we use it to find the nearest petrol station, order food at home, and track an arriving package. Accurate satellite-enabled positioning and timing technology is also becoming vital in many industrial sectors of the economy, including transport, agriculture, resources, and utilities. On behalf of the Australian government and in partnership with New Zealand, Geoscience Australia is improving satellite navigation capability for everyone with the Southern Positioning Augmentation Network, or SouthPAN. SouthPAN is a Satellite-Based Augmentation System that will use new spacecraft, ground sensors, and other infrastructure to broadcast corrections that complement existing Global Navigation Satellite Systems—like GPS, for example. SouthPAN services will commence in 2022 and be progressively improved in the coming years, ultimately being used in their most critical application: by aircraft to land at airports.

Characterising earthquake hazard in low seismicity regions is challenging, due to both the inherent lack of data and an incomplete theoretical understanding of the controls on earthquake occurrence away from plate boundaries. In the plate boundary paradigm, elastic rebound theory predicts that cycles of strain accumulation and release will result in regular, or quasiperiodic, recurrence of large earthquakes on individual faults. Analysis of a global compilation of long-term earthquake records shows that this largely holds in plate boundary regions, but begins to break down in intraplate and other low seismicity regions, where more irregular, or aperiodic, earthquake recurrence is observed. In this talk the Otago region of southern New Zealand is used as a case study of a low seismicity region with evidence for aperiodic earthquake recurrence. New paleoearthquake and slip rate data are used to extend the record of faulting back more than 100 ka on two faults, the Hyde and Dunstan faults. These data allow the variability of earthquake rates on these faults to be characterised, with novel Bayesian methods developed to forecast the probability of future earthquakes. Finally, the talk discusses the potential for application of these methods in the Australian context.

Perth Canyon is Australia's second largest submarine canyon, and its elongate and continental shelf-incising morphology contrasts with Australia's more prolific slope-confined canyons. The canyon's sinuous course extends for 120 km from the continental shelf break (~180 m depth, only 50 km offshore from Perth) to its fan at the foot of the continental slope (~4500 m). This seminar will describe the application of a new, internationally-collaborative mapping approach to capture the complexity of the canyon and to link its modern morphology to subsurface data and thereby reconstruct its geological evolution. Infilled incised valleys found in seismic data beneath the canyon headwall suggest that the canyon initially incised in the Late Cretaceous (around 70 million years ago), and subsequent incisions and canyon activity have since declined in scale. Repeat surveys of the canyon headwall following two relatively large earthquakes in 2018 reveal minimal instability of the seafloor and suggest that the canyon is now less active than in it has been in its geological past.

This seminar will give a preview of the Digital Atlas and also look at the challenges and expectations driving the evolving, complex and misunderstood location data landscape. It will also explore how key partners from across government are working together to navigate this landscape and pave the way for a location-enabled future for Australia. The ways we live, work and learn, are ever evolving, even more so following the challenges we have faced in recent years. The rapid growth of location-enabled technologies, and new and emerging data sources are driving increased demand for real-time location data and personalised data streaming. As a nation, we need a data infrastructure and the capability to connect, access and analyse the wealth of government data assets to empower data-driven, evidence-based decisions. The Australian Government recognise the importance of location-based data and technology as a critical input to decision-making and are investing in key national digital and data initiatives. The Digital Atlas of Australia is one of these initiatives being led by Geoscience Australia. The Digital Atlas will bring together, curate and connect trusted national datasets from across government into an interactive, secure, and easy-to-use online platform. It will enable anyone, anywhere to explore, analyse and visualise location-based data on geography, people, economy, and the environment. Governments, businesses and communities will be empowered to make data-driven, evidence-based decisions about planning, infrastructure and investment at the local, regional and national level.

Earth is the only terrestrial planet in the solar system with continents, and hence understanding their evolution is vital to unravelling what makes Earth special – our liquid oceans, oxygenated atmosphere, and ultimately, life. The continental crust is also host to all our mineable mineral deposits, and hence it has played a key role in the establishment of human civilisation. This link between the crust and human development will be even more prominent through the need for critical metals, as our society transitions toward green technologies. In this talk, we will discuss the link between the time-space evolution of the continental crust and the location of major mineral systems. By using isotopic data from micron-scale zircon crystals, we can map the crustal architectures that control the large-scale localisation of numerous mineral provinces. This work demonstrates the intimate link between the evolution of the continents, the understanding of mineral systems, and ultimately our continued evolution as an industrialised society.

Sustainable development and the transition to a clean-energy economy drives ever-increasing demand for base metals, substantially outstripping the discovery rate of new deposits and necessitating dramatic improvements in exploration success. This talk presents the tale of the surprising discovery that 85% of sediment-hosted base metals, including all giant deposits, in Australia and around the world, occur above the transition between thick and thin portions of tectonic plates. It is a story of integrated geoscience, which builds on decades of research in geology, geochemistry and geophysics through a global partnership, which has transformed the search for new exploration frontiers.