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  • This disc contains PDF scans of uranium-related reports held by GA from the Australian Atomic Energy Commission archives. These reports date mostly from the 70s, with some which are much older (as early as 1901) but none newer than the early 80s. The reports are a mix of exploration reports, geological and geographical maps, proposals, feasibility studies, estimations, reserve information, drill hole data and drill cross section files. These reports pertain to the South Alligator Valley, Katherine RIver and other uranium fields within Pine Creek region. It is one of four discs containing reports concerning uranium in the Northern Territory.

  • Data acquired as part of the Kombolgie VTEMTM Airborne Electromagnetic Survey have been inverted using a layered earth inversion algorithm. Interpretation products have been derived from the inversion results. The inversion results and derived products have been released by Geoscience Australia as a digital data package. The survey was funded under the Australian Government's Onshore Energy Security Program, and was managed and interpreted by Geoscience Australia's Airborne Electromagnetic Acquisition and Interpretation Project. The Kombolgie survey area, in the Pine Creek Orogen of the Northern Territory, covered sections of the Cobourg Peninsula, Junction Bay, Alligator River, Milingimbi, Mount Evelyn, Katherine, and Urapunga 1:250 000 map sheets. It covered a total of 8 800 line km and an area of 32 000 km2. The data were acquired under contract by Geotech Airborne Pty. Ltd. using its VTEMTM helicopter-borne electromagnetic system. The inversions were carried out using the GA-LEI layered-earth inversion software developed at Geoscience Australia. Products include the layer conductivities, depth and elevation slices, and sections. The products are in digital form in both point-located and gridded formats. They are available for download from the Geoscience Australia website.

  • A revolution is underway in the regulatory intensity of the marine jurisdiction and the technologies by which the jurisdiction is defined, navigated on and policed. This revolution if not properly managed has the capacity to undermine the technical and legal compact by which the most fundamental aspects of UNCLOS are managed - the maritime zones. The ready availability of high resolution coastal imagery and data, collected at high repeat cycles breaks the nexus between cartographic products and the baseline determination where its legal definition is the physical coastline. It is impractical to monitor, compute, distribute and archive the baseline of a highly dynamic coastline. In addition, the increasing establishment of spatially complex marine regulations creates an insatiable demand for more certainty in the determination of maritime zones. For instance, Australia administers over eighty separate regulatory zones through a dozen different agencies. States require a new method of characterising their baselines that is defensible in a precise digital world, and does not impose the costly and burdensome process of mapping a coastline in constant flux. The practical resolution is to adopt a fixed baseline compiled from the best available digital data at an epoch, then periodically updated it when considered appropriate. A fixed baseline is the answer to this problem which will bring with it certainty and repeatability via a method that recognises the costly and complex overhead of coastline characterisation. In this paper I will present a case for the adoption of a fixed baseline; illustrate the expensive impracticality of attempting to represent a fluid coastline to a world demanding certainty; how fixed baselines could form the basis of maritime zones; and finally demonstrate that adopting a fixed baseline is consistent with and desirable to International convention.

  • The cyclonic wind hazard over the Australian region is determined using synthetic tropical cyclone event sets derived from general circulation models (GCMs) to provide guidance on the potential impacts of climate change. Cyclonic wind hazard (defined as the return period wind speed) is influenced by the frequency, intensity and spatial distribution of tropical cyclones, all of which may change under future climate regimes due to influences such as warmer sea surface temperatures and changes in the global circulation. Cyclonic wind hazard is evaluated using a statistical-parametric model of tropical cyclones - the Tropical Cyclone Risk Model (TCRM) - which can be used to simulate many thousands of years of cyclone activity. TCRM is used to generate synthetic tracks which are statistically similar to the input event set - either an historical record or other synthetic event set. After applying a parametric wind field to the simulated tracks, we use the aggregated wind fields to evaluate the return period wind speeds for three IPCC AR4 scenarios, and make comparisons to the corresponding average recurrence interval wind speed estimates for current climate simulations. Results from the analysis of two GCMs are presented and contrasted with hazard estimates based on the historical record of tropical cyclones in the Australian region.

  • pH is one of the more fundamental soil properties governing nutrient availability, metal mobility, elemental toxicity, microbial activity and plant growth. The field pH of topsoil (0-10 cm depth) and subsoil (~60-80 cm depth) was measured on floodplain soils collected near the outlet of 1186 catchments covering over 6 M km2 or ~80% of Australia. Field pH duplicate data, obtained at 124 randomly selected sites, indicates a precision of 0.5 pH unit (or 7%) and mapped pH patterns are consistent and meaningful. The median topsoil pH is 6.5, while the subsoil pH has a median pH of 7 but is strongly bimodal (6-6.5 and 8-8.5). In most cases (64%) the topsoil and subsoil pH values are similar, whilst, among the sites exhibiting a pH contrast, those with more acidic topsoils are more common (28%) than those with more alkaline topsoils (7%). The distribution of soil pH at the national scale indicates the strong controls exerted by precipitation and ensuing leaching (e.g., low pH along the coastal fringe, high pH in the dry centre), aridity (e.g., high pH where calcrete is common in the regolith), vegetation (e.g., low pH reflecting abundant soil organic matter), and subsurface lithology (e.g., high pH over limestone bedrock). The new data, together with existing soil pH datasets, can support regional-scale decision-making relating to agricultural, environmental, infrastructural and mineral exploration decisions.

  • The Gazetteer provides information on the location and spelling of more than 332 000 geographical names across Australia as at January 2011. The supply of data is coordinated by the Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping and derived from State, Territory and Australian Government agencies. Copyright of the Gazetteer data resides with the relevant state, territory and Australian Government agencies which are custodians of the data. The Gazetteer fields include: - Record ID - unique feature identifier for each feature. - Authority ID - custodian state or territory. - State ID - state or territory which contains the feature. - Name - name of the feature. - Feature Code - code indicating the type of feature - Status - indicates whether the name is authorised. - Variant name - variant or alternative name used for the feature. - Postcode - Postcode for the feature. - Concise Gazetteer - indicates whether the feature is included in the concise gazetteer. - Longitude - longitude of the feature in decimal degrees. - Latitude - latitude of the feature in decimal degrees. - 100K map number - 1:100 000 scale map number in which the feature is located. - CGDN - indicates whether the place name can be used in the state.au second level domains by community website portals which reflect community interests. Product specifications: - Coverage: Australia - Currency: 2010 - Coordinates: Geographical - Datum: GDA94 - Format: Fixed width ASCII and Microsoft Access Database - Medium: WEB - Forward Program: Annual revision Please note: The custodians of the place name data do not guarantee that the data is free from errors and omissions. If possible errors or omissions in the data are identified, please contact <a href=mailto:gazetteer@ga.gov.au>gazetteer@ga.gov.au</a>, corrections are forwarded to the State and Territories, Name Authorities for clarification. Updates will appear in subsequent revisions of the Gazetteer.

  • Flythrough movie showing the bathymetry of Carnarvon shelf, highlighting benthic habitats at Point Cloates. The bathymetric image is derived from multibeam sonar collected in 2008 using a 300 kHz Simrad EM3002 system on RV Solander. Key features on the shelf include a prominent ridge at 60 m water depth and a complex area of smaller ridges and mounds across the inner shelf. The ridges and mounds provide hard substrate for diverse coral and sponge communities. The Carnarvon shelf is a study site for the Marine Biodiversity Research Hub, funded through the Commonwealth Environment Research Facilities (CERF) programme. Survey work was carried out as a collaboration between Geoscience Australia and the Australian Institute of Marine Science. Further information is provided in GA Record 2009/02.

  • In 2010 the Australian Government offered for the first time a large exploration block for acreage release in the frontier Mentelle Basin. This large sedimentary basin (36, 000 m2) is located about 150 km to the west of Cape Leeuwin. It lies beneath the continental slope off the Yallingup Shelf and the Naturaliste Though, a bathymetric saddle, separating the Australian margin from the Naturaliste Plateau. Water depths range from 500-1500 on the continental slope to almost 4000 m in the central part of the Naturaliste Trough. To enable petroleum prospectivity assessment of this frontier basin in 2008-09 Geoscience Australia acquired 2570 km of industry standard seismic, as well as gravity and magnetic data during the Southwest Margins seismic survey 310. Interpretation of the new seismic data resulted in mapping of the main structures and supersequences and led to a better undertsanding of the Mentelle Basin geology. Petroleum prospectivity assessment of the Mentelle Basin confirmed that the Mentelle Basin has a significant potential to become a new petroleum province. The work undertaken by Geoscience Australia team suggests that the Mentelle Basin has at least one active petroleum system. The basin is likely to contain multiple source rock intervals associated with coals and carbonaceous shales, as well as regionally extensive reservoirs and seals within fluvial, lacustrine and marine strata. A wide range of play types have been identified in the Mentelle Basin, including faulted anticlines and highside fault blocks, sub-basalt anticlines and fault blocks, drape and forced fold plays, and a large range of stratigraphic and unconformity plays.

  • We have used data recorded by a temporary seismograph deployment to infer constraints on the state of crustal stress in the Flinders Ranges in south-central Australia. Previous stress estimates for the region have been poorly constrained due to the lack of large events and limited station coverage for focal mechanisms. New data allowed 65 events with 544 first motions to be used in a stress inversion to estimate the principal stress directions and stress ratio.While our initial inversion suggested that stress in the region was not homogeneous, we found that discarding data for events in the top 2km of the crust resulted in a well-constrained stress orientation that is consistent with the assumption of homogeneous stress throughout the Flinders Ranges. We speculate that the need to screen out shallow events may be due to the presence in the shallow crust of either: (1) small-scale velocity heterogeneity that would bias the ray parameter estimates, or (2) heterogeneity in the stress field itself, possibly due to the influence of the relatively pronounced topographic relief. The stress derived from earthquakes in the Flinders Ranges show an oblique reverse faulting stress regime, which contrasts with the pure thrust and pure strike slip regimes suggested by earlier studies. However, the roughly E-W direction of maximum horizontal compressive stress we obtain supports the conclusion of virtually all previous studies that the Flinders Ranges are undergoing E-W compression due to orogenic events at the boundaries of the Australian and Indian Plates.

  • This dataset reflects the boundaries of claimant and nonclaimant native title applications that have been determined in part or in full, together with attribution about that determination. This dataset is stored nationally. The National Native Title Register (s192, Native Title Act, Commonwealth), is a register containing information about each determination of native title by the Federal or High Court or by a recognized State or Territory body. Determinations are categorized by both process and outcome. Process will be by consent, litigation or unopposed. Outcome will be that native title will have been found to exist in full or part, or been extinguished. Those determinations subject to appeal are also noted. Geospatial data portraying native title information produced by the National Native Title Tribunal may not be on-sold. Value added products using this data must acknowledge the National Native Title Tribunal as the data source and include the NNTT disclaimer.