The cartographic collection of the Doc Fisher Geoscience Library consists of the maps and air photos created or acquired by agency staff since the formation of BMR in 1946. This includes maps produced by agencies which have merged with these over the years, such as AUSLIG. Maps held include: Australian geological map series (1:250,000, 1:100,000 and the 1 mile series); topographic maps produced by NATMAP and its predecessors (1:250,000, 1:100,000 and 1:50,000) - latest editions only; various Australian geochemical, geophysical and other thematic maps; geoscience map series from other countries acquired on an exchange basis, including some with accompanying explanatory notes; Non-series maps acquired by donation or exchange; atlases. The Air photos are predominantly those used for mapping Australia and, to a lesser extent, Papua New Guinea and Antarctica, by BMR/AGSO from the 1940s to the 1980s. Geographical coverage of the sets is not complete, but many individual photos are unique in that they have pin points, overlays or other markings made by teams in the field. The Papua New Guinea photographs in the collection may, in many cases, be the only existing copies. Flight diagrams are also held for many (but not all) sets of air photos. Some other related materials, such as montages of aerial photographs (orthophotos), are also represented in the collection.

This preliminary report will provide a geochemical and ionic characterisation of groundwater, to determine baseline conditions and, if possible, to distinguish between different aquifers in the Laura basin. The groundwater quality data will be compared against the water quality guidelines for aquatic ecosystem protection, drinking water use, primary industries, use by industry, recreation and aesthetics, and cultural and spiritual values to assess the environmental values of groundwater and the treatment that may be required prior to reuse or discharge.

This map is part of a series which comprises 50 maps which covers the whole of Australia at a scale of 1:1 000 000 (1cm on a map represents 10km on the ground). Each standard map covers an area of 6 degrees longitude by 4 degrees latitude or about 590 kilometres east to west and about 440 kilometres from north to south. These maps depict natural and constructed features including transport infrastructure (roads, railway airports), hydrography, contours, hypsometric and bathymetric layers, localities and some administrative boundaries, making this a useful general reference map.

G51/B1-83

The shallow water equations are widely used to model flood and tsunami flows, for example to develop inundation maps for hazard and risk assessments. Finite volume numerical methods are commonly used to derive approximate solutions to these problems, because of their potential to exactly conserve mass and momentum, and correctly simulate both smoothly and rapidly varying flows. However, there remain several common scenarios which often cause numerical difficulties. The occurrence of stationary water near complex wet-dry boundaries is a standard initial condition for tsunami applications. Many numerical methods will generate spurious waves in this situation, which can propagate into the flow domain and contaminate the solution. A related situation involves the simulation of run-off caused by direct rainfall inputs, which is often desirable for flood applications as an alternative to providing discharge inputs derived from rainfall-runoff models. Conserving mass and avoiding unrealistic 'spikes' in the simulated flow velocities can be challenging, particularly when the flow depth is much shallower than the elevation range of each mesh cell, as is practically unavoidable in large scale applications. Several techniques to robustly treat these situations have been implemented in variants of the ANUGA hydrodynamic model, and the performance of these is assessed in a range of ideal and practical examples.

Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web services offer a cost efficient technology that permits transfer of standardised data from distributed sources, removing the need for data to be regularly uploaded to a centralised database. When combined with community defined exchange standards, the OGC services offer a chance to access the latest data from the originating agency and return the data in a consistent format. Interchange and mark-up languages such as the Geography Markup Language (GML) provide standard structures for transferring geospatial information over the web. The IUGS Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information (CGI) has an on-going collaborative project to develop a data model and exchange language based on GML for geological map and borehole data, the GeoScience Mark-up Language (GeoSciML). The Australian Government Geoscience Information Committee (GGIC) has used the GeoSciML model as a basis to cover mineral resources (EarthResourceML), and the Canadian Groundwater Information Network (GIN) has extended GeoSciML into the groundwater domain (GWML). The focus of these activities is to develop geoscience community schema that use globally accepted geospatial web service data exchange standards.

These products form part of the exhibition celebrating GA's involvement in the ACT and are produced as part of the ACT centenary.

This map shows the area of the Commonwealth Scalefish Hook Sector Gulper Shark Closure - Southern Dogfish. Modified from GeoCat 65110 (2007) as per the Southern and Eastern Scalefish and Shark Fishery (Closures) Direction No. 1 2009 - Schedule 16. Produced for the Australian Fisheries Management Authority. Not for public sale or distribution by GA.

The Australian Government formally releases new offshore exploration areas at the annual APPEA conference. These areas are located across various offshore hydrocarbon provinces ranging from mature basins with ongoing oil and gas production to exploration frontiers. In support of the annual acreage release, Geoscience Australia (GA) provides a variety of technical information with an emphasis on basin evolution, stratigraphic frameworks and overviews of hydrocarbon prospectivity. In recent years, GA's petroleum geological studies have significantly high graded the prospectivity of large underexplored offshore regions such as the Ceduna Sub-basin and the Northern Perth Basin. A new program is now targeting areas that lie adjacent to producing regions with the aim to delineate the occurrence and distribution of petroleum systems elements in less explored or in unsuccessful areas and to provide a comprehensive overview of the regional geological evolution. Updates to the stratigraphic framework and new results from geochemical studies are already available and are used for prospectivity assessments. Furthermore, the Australian government continues to assist offshore exploration activities by providing free access to a wealth of geological and geophysical data.

H51/B1-136