From minerals to meteorites, this presentation will delve into the amazing specimens held at the National Mineral & Fossil Collection, explore our recent work and projects, and identify our diverse stakeholders that we interact with as part of our goals of custodianship, education, outreach, and research support. The National Mineral & Fossil Collection houses world-class mineral, meteorite, fossil, and rock thin-section specimens. The collection is of scientific, historic, aesthetic, and social significance. Geoscience Australia is responsible for the management and preservation of the collection, as well as facilitating access to the collection for research, geoscience education, and public engagement. The collection contains an impressive: • 20,000 gem, mineral and meteorite specimens from localities in Australia and across the globe. • 45,000 published palaeontological specimens contained in the Commonwealth Palaeontological Collection (CPC). • 1,000,000 unpublished fossils in a ‘Bulk Fossil’ collection. • 100,000 rock thin section slides. • 200 historical geoscience instruments including, cartography, geophysical, and laboratory equipment.

In geoscience we often use ‘quality’ to describe our activities and products, but what does ‘quality’ actually look like? How do we measure it and determine if something is the ‘quality’ facility or ‘quality’ data we say it is? This is not simply an esoteric thought experiment – it matters: end-users and stakeholders are already making decisions potentially affecting whole communities and worth millions of dollars based on their understanding of the quality of our geochemical analytical data. These products are the foundation of Geoscience Australia’s reputation as a trusted advisor to government, communities and industry. This talk will guide you through the Geoscience Australia Laboratory, paying particular focus to our role in quality control and assurance for a range of analytical data products, including our core analytical capabilities in Organic Geochemistry, Microanalysis and Physical Properties. You will hear how the labs are evolving as we build new facilities and build on our capabilities. You will learn more about the importance of quality, how it is defined and some tools to apply in your own work.

Antarctica conjures images of expansive white icesheets but what about the 1% not covered by ice? Though small, these exposed islands of rock are hotspots of human and animal activity. Tourism, infrastructure development, and research activities can harm these fragile environments and in the dry Antarctic climate, damage from walking and vehicle tracks can persist for years. Geoscience Australia’s landscape vulnerability project has been addressing knowledge gaps about how these environments react to disturbance by people, how they recover, and new methods to track landscape change. Through this work, GA is helping build Australia’s capability as a leader in Antarctic environmental stewardship and meet our obligations under the Antarctic Treaty System and domestic legislation.

• Vertical datums are a foundational piece of the positioning puzzle that allows us make sense of height measurements - they make it possible to align height data by defining where all heights are zero. But when the vertical datum is unreliable, we lose perspective on which direction is down and this can cause strange things to happen. Water can appear to flow in the wrong direction or pool in unexpected places. • The Australian Height Datum (AHD) is the current, official, vertical datum in use in Australia. At 50 years old this year, it has stood the test of time well. But, it has a number of bumps and wrinkles (errors and distortions), relies on degrading physical infrastructure and was never intended to be used with modern positioning technology like GPS. The Australian Vertical Working Surface is a shiny new alternative vertical datum that doesn’t depend on any physical infrastructure, is free from the errors in the AHD and is designed to be directly compatible with GPS technology in the first instance.

This talk presents an overview of flood vulnerability research in the Community Safety Branch at Geoscience Australia. It covers work looking at the tangible and intangible costs of floods. Vulnerability models for residential, commercial and industrial buildings are described. The cost-effectiveness of structural mitigation options have been evaluated in recent work undertaken in collaboration with Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC. The presentation highlights the utility of this research in reducing flood risk in Australian communities.

For National Reconciliation Week, Geoscience Australia staff will present the progress of the organisation's first Innovate Reconciliation Action Plan as well as examples of engagement and collaboration with First Nations Australians.

The magnetotellurics (MT) method maps the electrical conductivity/resistivity structure of the subsurface, which provides crucial information for mineral exploration. Geoscience Australia has actively applied the method to provide multiscale world-leading datasets to improve the understanding of geology and resource potential. We demonstrate the value of scaled MT data acquisition starting from mapping large-scale conductivity structures in the lithosphere utilising long-period MT datasets through to the resolution of finer scale structures in the crust suitable for camp scale targeting. Integration of data from multiscale surveys provides an effective way to narrow the search space and to identify ‘targets’ of mineral potential in covered terranes. Our work has helped to increase explorers’ investment confidence for new mineral discoveries in greenfield regions.

One annoying geodetic variable is a treasure trove of information to meteorologists. This talk will focus on a project in partnership with the BoM, RMIT and FrontierSI turned our estimates of the tropospheric delay in our GPS analysis into useful information for weather forecasting systems. The system works by measuring the time it takes GPS signals from satellites to reach ground receivers. Signals can be slightly delayed by moisture in the troposphere, causing what's known as a zenith total delay, so scientists measure this delay to assess air moisture While the technology could be applied almost anywhere, it is particularly valuable in a sparsely populated country like Australia where there is a lack of ground-based meteorological observation stations. Atmospheric water vapour is highly variable and non-linear in nature, yet it is important for accurate weather forecasting of storms. Having a direct observation from GPS provides an exciting opportunity for near and real-time weather forecasting systems.

The Copernicus Australasia Regional Data Hub (the Hub) is Australasia’s gateway to Sentinel satellite data from Europe’s Copernicus Programme in our region, covering a third of the Earth’s surface. A free, open and trusted service that has shared over 10 Petabytes (PB) of Sentinel data, to a monthly average of 700 users from 40 different countries, since going fully operational in April 2018! The Copernicus Programme is a € 6.7 billion and 20+ year programme, financed and managed by the European Commission (EC). The Sentinel satellites that collect this data are built and operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). A cooperation arrangement between the EC and the Commonwealth (represented by Geoscience Australia) to access and use Sentinel data for the delivery of innovative products and services for societal benefit created the opportunity for the Hub, which is enabled by technical agreements with ESA and EUMETSAT. A consortium of five government agency Partners fund the Hub. So what’s Geoscience Australia’s (GA) role in all this and why is the Hub important? Furthermore, what does Eurovision have to do with it? Come join me to find out.

Rapid population growth and an increasing demand for water has been depleting groundwater resources in the Central Valley of California for decades. The lack of sufficient ground monitoring networks poses serious challenges to water management efforts and puts the sustainability of groundwater resources at risk. This seminar will demonstrate how the satellite remote sensing techniques of Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) can be applied to monitor groundwater resources and aquifer response to drought. The final part of this seminar will describe how GA is currently trialling the demonstrated methods as remote groundwater monitoring tools in the Great Artesian Basin of Australia.