<div>The lookbook accompanies a loan of Australian critical mineral samples provided by Geoscience Australia for display at the Australian Embassy in Washington DC, United States.&nbsp; It contains information about each of the samples, including their provenance, mineral or rock name, and the critical mineral they contain.</div>

We are often faced with uncertainty when making decisions – from trivial decisions such as whether to take an umbrella, or major decisions such as whether to buy that house. Appreciating the uncertainty in future conditions (‘will it rain today?’; ‘will house prices continue to go up?’) is crucial to making good decisions. This is no different for water resource managers, who need to make decisions on flood prevention, climate adaptation or coal resource developments. As scientists, we strive to inform decision-makers about uncertainties in a comprehensive, unbiased and transparent manner. In this paper, we discuss some of the challenges and approaches used to communicate uncertainty during our contributions to the Bioregional Assessments Programme, a federally funded research project to assess the potential impacts of coal resource development on water resources and water-dependent assets in eastern Australia. A first step in analysing potential impacts, is to identify the causal pathways that detail how development activities can possibly affect the groundwater and surface water systems, and how these changes might affect the economic, social and ecological functioning of a region. This conceptual model provides the framework for detailed geological, hydrogeological, hydrological and ecological modelling. Predictions have traditionally been made using a single deterministic model, a calibrated model that best fits the available observations. However, to assess the likelihood of potential impacts, we used a stochastic approach to create an ensemble of possible predictions (hundreds and thousands of possible answers) that are all consistent with the available observations. This results in a range or distribution of predictions. However, communicating the range of model results, as well as all of the complexities and underlying assumptions in a way that is relevant and accessible to decision-makers is very challenging. For bioregional assessments, we have worked with decision makers to improve communication of uncertainty using a consistent, calibrated language, tables, plots of the range of predictions and maps designed to convey probabilistic information in an intuitive manner. Further, model details and assumptions are documented in technical reports, and the data, models and predictions are made publicly available to increase transparency and reproducibility. The amount and technical detail of that information can be challenging for decision-makers to identify what is important and what is not. To support decision-makers, we use a qualitative uncertainty analysis to summarise the rationale for and effect on prediction of each major assumption. This table, in combination with a plain English discussion, allows readers to rapidly appreciate the limitations, as well as opportunities for further data collection or modelling. Bioregional assessments have highlighted the importance of early consultation with target audiences, which has enabled us to tailor the uncertainty communication products to decision-makers, as well as avoid the potential for biased interpretation of results, where decision-makers are drawn to the extremes. <b>Citation:</b> Peeters, L.J.M., Crosbie, R.S., Henderson, B.H., Holland, K., Lewis, S., Post, D.A., Schmidt, R.K., The importance of being uncertain, <i>Water e-Journal</i>, Vol 3, No.2, 2018. ISSN 2206-1991. https//doi.org/10.21139/wej.2018.006

Catchment-scale hydrological and hydrogeological investigations commonly conclude by finding that particular stream reaches are either gaining or losing; they also often assume that the influence of bedrock aquifers on catchment water balances and water quality is insignificant. However, in many cases, such broad findings are likely to oversimplify the spatial and temporal complexity of the connections between the different hydrological system components, particularly in regions dominated by cycles of droughts and flooding. From a modelling perspective, such oversimplifications can have serious implications on the process of identifying the magnitude and direction of the exchange fluxes between the surface and groundwater systems. In this study, we use 3D geological modelling and historic water chemistry and hydraulic records to identify the origins of groundwater at different locations in the alluvium and along the course of streams in the Lockyer Valley (Queensland, Australia), a catchment impacted by a severe drought (‘Millennium Drought’) from 1998 to 2009, followed by extensive flooding in 2011. We also demonstrate how discharge from the sub-alluvial regional-scale volcanic and sedimentary bedrock influences the water balance and water quality of the alluvium and streams. The investigation of aquifer geometry via development of a three-dimensional geological model combined with an assessment of hydraulic data provided important insights on groundwater flow paths and helped to identify areas where bedrock aquifers interact with shallow alluvial aquifers and streams. Multivariate statistical techniques were then applied as an additional line of evidence to groundwater and surface water hydrochemical data from large historical datasets. This confirmed that most sub-catchments within the Lockyer Valley have distinct water chemistry patterns, which result from mixing of different water sources, including discharge from the sub-alluvial bedrock. Importantly, in addition to the observed spatial variability, time-series hydrochemical groundwater and surface water data further demonstrated that the hydraulic connection between alluvial aquifers, streams and sub-alluvial bedrock aquifers is temporally dynamic with very significant changes occurring at the transition from normal to drought conditions and following flooding, affecting both catchment water quality and water balances. <b>Citation:</b> M. Raiber, S. Lewis, D.I. Cendón, T. Cui, M.E. Cox, M. Gilfedder, D.W. Rassam, Significance of the connection between bedrock, alluvium and streams: A spatial and temporal hydrogeological and hydrogeochemical assessment from Queensland, Australia, <i>Journal of Hydrology</i>, Volume 569, 2019, ISSN 0022-1694, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2018.12.020.

<div>The Australian Seismometers in Schools (AuSIS) network operates 50 broadband seismic stations across Australia that are hosted at schools. The instruments augment the Australian National Seismograph Network providing valuable data from urban and regional Australia. The network coverage is quite sparse, but these vital records of rare, moderate Australian earthquakes can improve our understanding of the deformation within the stable-continental region of Australia, especially for events with no surface rupture. In this study, we present the feasibility of identifying the fault plane of moderate earthquakes on the Australian continent, using data from the AuSIS network. We examine the fault plane of the September 2021, MW 5.9 Woods Point earthquake that occurred about 130 km northeast of the Melbourne metropolitan area. We estimate the hypocenter and the centroid-moment-tensor to identify the fault plane from the auxiliary plane in the focal mechanism. We explore a range of 1D models and a 3D Earth model to simulate seismic arrivals and full waveform data. The hypocenter is resolved using P and S-wave arrivals in a probabilistic framework and the centroid-moment-tensor is derived from full waveform modelling through grid search over a set of trial points around the hypocenter. Our solution suggests the main shock ruptured the depth of 15±4 km, with a strike-slip mechanism striking 348º North on a nearly vertical plane. The high double-couple (DC) percentage of this event indicates a simple rupture that propagated from the south (hypocenter) toward the north (centroid) and remained subsurface with no surface exposure. This indicates that the causative fault had a deeper structure than the previously known shallow, NW-SE striking faults of the region. The P- and T-axis deduced from our fault model are notably aligned with the maximum horizontal crustal stress in the region.</div> <b>Citation:</b> Sima Mousavi, Babak Hejrani, Meghan S. Miller, Michelle Salmon; Hypocenter, Fault Plane, and Rupture Characterization of Australian Earthquakes: Application to the September 2021 M_w 5.9 Woods Point Earthquake. <i>Seismological Research Letters</i> 2023;; 94 (4): 1761–1774. doi: https://doi.org/10.1785/0220220348

<div>The recent federal funding of the <em>National Space Mission for Observation</em> is in no small part a recognition of the capability of the Australian EO community and central to this is the ability to mount effective national-scale field validation programs.</div><div><br></div><div>After many delays, Landsat 9 was launched on the 27th September 2021. Before being handed to the USGS for operational use, NASA had oversight of configuring and testing the new platform and navigating it into its final operational orbit.&nbsp;For a brief few days and a handful of overpasses globally, Landsat 9 was scheduled to fly ‘under’ its predecessor Landsat 8. &nbsp;This provided the global EO community a ‘once in a mission lifetime’ opportunity to collect field validation data from both sensors.</div><div><br></div><div>At short notice the USGS were advised on the timing and location of these orbital overpasses. &nbsp;For Australia, this meant that between the 11th and 17th&nbsp;of November we would see a single overpass with 100% sensor overlap and three others that featured only 10% overlap. Geoscience Australia (who have a longstanding partnership with the USGS on satellite Earth observation) put out a call to the Australian EO community for collaborators.</div><div><br></div><div>Despite this compressed timeline, COVID travel restrictions and widespread La Niña induced rain and flooding, teams from CSIRO, Queensland DES, Environment NSW, University of WA, Frontier SI and GA were able to capture high value ground and water validation data in each of the overpasses.</div><div><br></div><div>Going forward, the Australian EO community need to maintain and build on these skills and capabilities such that the community can meet the future demands of not only our existing international EO collaborations but the imminent arrival of Australian orbiting EO sensors. Abstract presented at Advancing Earth Observation Forum 2022 (https://www.eoa.org.au/event-calendar/2021/12/1/advancing-earth-observation-aeo-2021-22-forum)

<div>Mineral prospectivity studies seek to map evidence of mineral system activity, with the aim of informing mineral exploration decisions and guiding exploration in the face of uncertainty. These studies leverage the growing volumes of information that are available to characterise the lithosphere by compiling covariate (or feature) grids that represent key mineral system ingredients. Previous studies have been categorised as either “knowledge-driven” or “data-driven” approaches depending on whether these grids are integrated via expert elicitation or by the empirical relationship to known mineralisation, respectively. However, to our knowledge, the underlying modelling framework and assumptions have not been systematically reviewed to understand how choices in the approach to the problem influence modelling outcomes. Here we show the broad mathematical equivalence in these approaches and highlight the limitations inherent when optimising to minimise misfit in potentially under-determined problems. We argue that advances in mineral prospectivity are more likely to be driven by careful consideration of the model selection problem. Focusing effort on model selection will not only drive more robust mineral prospectivity predictions but may also simultaneously refine our understanding of key mineral system processes. To build on these results, we present the Mineral Potential Toolkit; a software repository to facilitate feature engineering, statistical appraisal, and quantitative prospectivity modelling. The toolkit enables a novel approach that combines the best aspects of previous methods. Abstract presented to the 26th World Mining Congress 2023 (https://wmc2023.org/)

This 12-page teacher guide is intended for upper primary teachers but may also be useful in secondary classrooms as well. The guide explains how to set up a micro:bit (tiny inexpensive computer) as a mini seismometer that will detect shaking, and how to collect and display the data. The guide also includes classroom-ready activities on how to introduce and explore vibrations and earthquake monitoring.

Northern Australia contains extensive Proterozoic aged sedimentary basins that contain organic-rich rocks with the potential to host major petroleum and basin-hosted mineral systems (Figures 1 and 2). These intracratonic basins include the greater McArthur Basin including the McArthur and Birrindudu basins and the Tomkinson Provence (Close 2014), the Isa Superbasin and the South Nicholson Basin. The sedimentary sections within these basins are assumed to be of equivalent age and deposited under similar climatic controls resulting in correlative lithology, source facies and stratigraphic intervals. The greater McArthur Basin contains Paleoproterozoic to Mesoproterozoic organic-rich siltstones and shales with the potential to generate conventional oil and gas deposits, self-sourced continuous shale oil and shale gas targets (Munson 2014; Revie 2017; Weatherford Laboratories 2017). Exploration has focused on the Beetaloo Sub-basin where organic-rich siltstones of the Velkerri Formation contain up to 10 weight percent total organic carbon (wt % TOC) and have been assessed to contain 118 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of gas-in-place (Munson 2014; Revie 2017; Weatherford Laboratories 2017; Revie and Normington 2018). Other significant source rocks include the Kyalla Formation of the Roper Group, the Barney Creek, Yalco and Lynott formations of the McArthur Group, the Wollogorang, and perhaps the McDermott formations of the Tawallah Group and the Vaughton Siltstone of the Balma Group in the northern greater McArthur Basin (Munson 2014). These source rocks are host to diverse play types, for example, Cote et al (2018) describes five petroleum plays in the Beetaloo Sub-basin; the Velkerri shale dry gas play, the Velkerri liquids-rich gas play, the Kyalla shale and hybrid liquid-rich gas play and the Hayfield Sandstone oil/condensate play. This highlights the large shale and tight gas resource potential of the McArthur Basin, the full extent of these resources are poorly understood and insufficiently quantified. More work is needed to characterise the source rocks, the petroleum generative potential, fluid migration pathways, the fluid types and the thermal and burial history to understand the hydrocarbon prospectivity of the basin. The Exploring for the Future (EFTF) program is a four-year (2016?-2020) $100.5 million initiative by the Australian Government conducted in partnership with state and Northern Territory government agencies, other key government, research and industry partners and universities. EFTF aims to boost northern Australia's attractiveness as a destination for investment in resource exploration. The Energy Systems Branch at Geoscience Australia has undertaken a regional study on the prospectivity of several northern Australian basins by expanding our knowledge of petroleum and mineral system geochemistry. Here we highlight some of the results of this ongoing program with a primary focus on the greater McArthur Basin. Abstract submitted to and presented at the Annual Geoscience Exploration Seminar (AGES) 2019 (https://www.aig.org.au/events/ages-2019/)

<div>Students can access and analyse real world earthquake data using online portals created by Geoscience Australia (GA) (Geoscience Australia data portal and Earthquakes@GA). The document provides background information for teachers about earthquakes and the online portals, as well as two student inquiry activities. Each activity includes instructions on how to access and use the relevant portal as well as questions that prompt students to find, record, and interpret the data. An Excel table is provided to accompany one of the activities.</div><div><br></div><div>The activities are suitable for use with secondary to senior secondary science and geography students. The topics covered in these activities include: earthquakes, plate tectonics and natural hazards.</div><div><br></div><div>The print version has lines provided for written answers, the accessible version is intended for digital responses. </div>

We are pleased to announce the forthcoming release of Ginan version 3, a suite of open-source Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) software tools developed and maintained by Geoscience Australia in collaboration with industry and academia under the Positioning Australia program. Ginan serves as a precise point positioning (PPP) engine to produce real-time products that support high-precision positioning. Its versatility is demonstrated through its applicability to various geodetic and positioning activities, including computation of daily coordinate solutions, precise satellite orbit determination, computation of satellite clocks and biases, atmospheric modeling, and data quality assurance and quality control. These products effectively mitigate real-time errors associated with GNSS observations and are openly accessible as a centimeter-accurate correction service. The primary objectives of Ginan are: (1) showcase Australia's unique modelling and analytic systems for multi-GNSS real-time processing, delivering precise positioning products to both the Australian and international Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) community; (2) offer expert advice on navigation system performance over Australia; and (3) provide state-of-the-art GNSS analysis center software to universities and research organizations, thus fostering Australia's leadership in geospatial technology development. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of Ginan version 3, highlighting its new features, the current development status, and the strategic roadmap for its continued use as an operational service. We will provide examples of Ginan’s usefulness as a platform for research and innovation including its use as the processing engine for research into atmospheric anomalies from the Tonga volcano eruption through monitoring travelling ionospheric disturbances that could be used as early warning and tsunamigenic predictors for disaster risk and reduction; and observations of the Turkyia earthquake. The release of Ginan version 3 marks a significant advancement in GNSS data processing and positioning capabilities, contributing to the broader scientific community's understanding and utilization of geospatial technology. Abstract to be submitted to/presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting 2023 (AGU23) - https://www.agu.org/fall-meeting