<div>Geoscience Australia's collaborative Antarctic Geoscience program provides scientific and strategic leadership on key national priorities in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><div>From February to April 2024 one of our scientists participated in an international marine expedition to the East Antarctic Ice Shelf along Australia's Antarctic Territory coast. The expedition aboard the Research Vessel <em>Polarstern</em> entitled "East Antarctic Ice Sheet Instability and its interaction with changes in Southern Ocean circulation - Part 3" (EASI-3), was the third of the EASI expeditions to investigate ocean–ice sheet interactions along the East Antarctic margin.&nbsp;</div><div><br></div><div>This talk presents the voyage highlights, including scientific exploration, seabed mapping, sonars, sediment sampling, ship life and wildlife, by inviting the audience into the world of an Antarctic expeditioner.&nbsp;</div><div><br></div>

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.

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.

From being a poorly understood qualitative mapping tool, airborne electromagnetic (AEM) geophysics has become a mainstay for rapidly imaging the top few hundred metres of buried earth for a variety of geoscientific and environmental purposes. In this talk, we will detail GA’s quest to provide high quality, quantitative interpretation of AEM sounding data. Beginning with a 20-year historical perspective, we will shed light on how persistent focus on AEM technology directly led to AusAEM, the world’s largest (ongoing) AEM survey. We will then discuss how continuing focus on AEM has led to the development of an open source framework written in the Julia language, for subsurface imaging AND uncertainty quantification. This codebase is useful for geophysical methods beyond AEM, such as magnetotellurics and magnetic resonance. Finally, we will dwell on some real life examples using the new codebase and will look to the future of AEM@GA and its untapped potential.

Hydrogen can be used for a variety of domestic and industrial purposes such as heating and cooking (as a replacement for natural gas), transportation (replacing petrol and diesel), and energy storage (by converting intermittent renewable energy into hydrogen). The key benefit of using hydrogen is that it is a clean fuel that emits only water vapour and heat when combusted. To support implementation of the National Hydrogen Strategy, Geoscience Australia in collaboration with Monash University are releasing the Hydrogen Economic Fairways Tool (HEFT). HEFT is a free online tool designed to support decision making by policymakers and investors on the location of new infrastructure and development of hydrogen hubs in Australia. It considers both hydrogen produced from renewable energy and from fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage. Tune in to this seminar to discover HEFT’s capabilities, its potential to attract worldwide investment into Australia’s hydrogen industry, and what’s up next for hydrogen at Geoscience Australia.