Series of information sheets designed to provide landholders and local community with information regarding the activities being underatken as part of the Southern Thomson pre-competitive geoscience project, run in collaboration with the Queensland and New South Wales State Geological Surveys.

Tsunami inundation models provide fundamental information about coastal areas that may be inundated in the event of a tsunami. This information has relevance for disaster management activities, including evacuation planning, impact and risk assessment, and coastal engineering. A basic input to tsunami inundation models is a digital elevation model-that is, a model of the shape of the onshore environment. Onshore DEMs vary widely in resolution, accuracy, availability, and cost. Griffin et al. (2012) assessed how the accuracy and resolution of DEMs translate into uncertainties in estimates of tsunami inundation zones. The results showed that simply using the 'best available' elevation data, such as the freely available global SRTM elevation model, without considering data accuracy can lead to dangerously misleading results.

A new approach was developed for Australia's 2011 national State of the Environment (SoE) report to integrate the assessment of biophysical and human elements of the environment. A Common Assessment and Reporting Framework (CARF) guided design and implementation, responding to jurisdictional complexity, outstanding natural diversity and ecosystem values, high levels of cultural and heritage diversity, and a paucity of national-scale data. The CARF provided a transparent response to the need for an independent, robust and evidence-based national SoE report. We conclude that this framework will be effective for subsequent national SoE assessments and other integrated national-scale assessments in data poor regions.

This USB has been produced for promotional purposes and will be handed out (free) at domestic and international conferences. The USB contains a selection of GA reports, flyers, maps and data. Products are grouped into 4 categories: Records and Brochures, Mineral Deposits, Geophysical Data and Surface Geology.

Geoscience Australia (GA) has been developing the National Exposure Information System (NEXIS), a national database of exposure information to identify elements in both the built environment and community that are at risk from natural disasters. A key component of NEXIS is the description of each building including footprint area and height; these geometric characteristics can be derived from LiDAR. This investigation is an assessment of the current abilities of GA and industry partners to provide this data. GA holds LiDAR data representing 70% of the places Australians live, however most of these dataset have not been processed to identify buildings. Five software methods and five industry partners were assessed for their ability to do two main tasks: identify or classify buildings in the LiDAR point clouds, and extract geometric characteristics of buildings. The extracted features were assessed using an urban LiDAR point cloud that has good accuracy and a high data density. Feature-based and area-based assessment methods were developed to assess the output of software packages against a reference building dataset provided by the Launceston Council. The various methods achieved a producer's accuracy between 80% and 90%, user's accuracy between 70% and 90%, and overall accuracy between 90% and 95%.

Mafic and ultramafic rocks hosted by metamorphosed deep marine sediments in the Glenelg River Complex of SE Australia comprise variably tectonised fragments of a late Neoproterozoic-earliest Cambrian hyper-extended continental margin that was dismembered and thrust westward over the adjacent continental margin during the Cambro-Ordovician Delamerian-Ross Orogeny. Ultramafic rocks include serpentinised harzburgite of inferred subcontinental lithospheric origin that had already been exhumed at the seafloor before sedimentation commenced whereas mafic rocks exhibit mainly E- and N-MORB basaltic compositions consistent with emplacement into a deep marine environment floored by little if any continental crust. Contrary to previous suggestions, these rocks and their metasedimentary host rocks are not a more distal correlative of the Cambrian Kanmantoo Group. The latter is host to basaltic rocks with higher degrees of crustal contamination and a detrital zircon population with a prominent peak at 500-600 Ma. Except for quartz greywacke in the uppermost part of the sequence, the Glenelg River Complex is devoid of detrital zircon, pointing to deep marine sedimentation far removed from any continental margin. Deep seismic reflection data support the idea that the Glenelg River Complex is underlain by a substrate of mafic and ultramafic rocks and preclude earlier interpretations based on aeromagnetic data that the continental margin hosts a thick pile of seaward-dipping basaltic flows analogous to those developed along volcanic margins in the North Atlantic.

Geochemical surveys collect sediment or rock samples, measure the concentration of chemical elements and report these typically either in weight percent or in parts per million. There are usually a large number of elements measured and the distributions are often skewed, containing many potential outliers. We present a new robust principal component analysis (PCA) method for geochemical survey data, which involves first transforming the compositional data onto various different manifolds using power transformations. A flexible set of moment assumptions are made which take the special geometry of each manifold into account. The Kent distribution moment structure arises as a special case when the chosen manifold is the hypersphere. We derive simple moment and robust estimators of the parameters which are also applicable in high dimensional settings. The resulting PCA based on these estimators is effectively done in the tangent space and is closely related to the power transformation method used in correspondence analysis. To illustrate, we analyse major oxide data from the National Geochemical Survey of Australia. When compared with the traditional approach in the literature based on the centred logratio transformation, the new PCA method is shown to be more successful at dimension reduction and gives more interpretable results.

Regional geophysical datasets are critical to the task of uncovering the basement geology of the southern Thomson Orogen in far western New South Wales. As part of a National Collaborative Framework project, aeromagnetic, gravity and seismic data have being processed and interpreted to construct the structural framework. Subdivision into structural domains has been validated and constrained by geological information, relying on observations and measurements from sparse drill holes and outcrops. Boundaries between structural domains are complex and poorly understood. This study aimed to recognise major faults and, where possible, define their displacements, depth extent, and understand their dynamics and timing. Analysis of available company and government seismic surveys provided details for some of the major fault systems such as the Olepoloko Fault, Culgoa Lineament, and also for many newly-recognised fault trends The seismic interpretations were reconciled with deeply-sourced aeromagnetic and gravity gradients that were enhanced by multiscale edge analysis. The structural framework will underpin geochronology and mineral systems studies as the Southern Thomson Orogen project continues.

Version 1 of the Water Theme of the Land Cover of Australia (Water25) is an ISO 19144-2 classification of the percentage of successful observations from Landsat 5 TM and Landsat 7 ETM+ sensors in which water was detected. Each satellite image pixel is an observation; Successful observations are those in which the land surface is clearly seen (unobscured by clouds for example) and quality checks are passed. Classes: - Perennial (water observed more than 75% of the time) - Non-perennial 60%-75% (water observed from 60 to 75% of the time) - Non perennial 30%-60% (water observed from 30 to 60% of the time) - Non perennial 8%-30% (water observed from 8% to 30% of the time) - Land subject to infrequent inundation 1%+ (water observed from 1% to 8% of the time) - No water observed Water25 can be used to map and characterise inland water bodies and provides information about the observed extent of inundation for waterways and floodplains. It is a resource for both users and providers of information about surface water permanence and the extent and frequency of inundation. Potential users include government agencies, research institutions, the general public and academia.

Oil and gas discoveries in Australia's offshore basins are concentrated on the North West Shelf (Northern Carnarvon, Browse and Bonaparte basins) and Bass Strait (Gippsland, Otway and Bass basins). While discoveries have been made in a few regions outside these areas (e.g. Perth Basin), a large proportion of Australia's offshore basins remain exploration frontiers. However, the decline in oil production from the North West Shelf and Bass Strait basins since 2000 has led to an increasing exploration interest in the frontier basins. There are 35 offshore frontier basins, sub-basins and provinces located on Australia's northern, northwestern, southwestern, southern, southeastern and remote eastern continental margins, where no hydrocarbons have been discovered, but where the presence of hydrocarbon accumulations is considered possible (Figure 1). These basins are diverse in terms of geology, prospectivity and accessibility, ranging from old (e.g. Proterozoic-Paleozoic Arafura Basin) to young (e.g. Mesozoic-Cenozoic Barcoo Sub-basin), from areas widely acknowledged to be highly prospective (e.g. Ceduna Sub-basin) to those where the prospectivity is more difficult to assess (e.g. Sorell Basin), and from the nearshore (e.g. offshore Sydney Basin) to the remote (e.g. New Caledonia Basin). Geoscience Australia recently completed a report on the geology and prospectivity of frontier basins in the Australian Maritime Jurisdiction, titled 'Petroleum Geology Inventory of Australia's Offshore Frontier Basins'. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the geology, petroleum systems, exploration status and data coverage for all offshore frontier basins, sub-basins and provinces, along with an assessment of the critical science questions and exploration uncertainties for each area. This work draws on the results of Geoscience Australia's pre-competitive data programs conducted from 2003 to 2011, as well as exploration results and the geoscience literature. The study assigns a petroleum prospectivity ranking to each basin, based on the presence or absence of evidence for the existence of active petroleum systems (Table 1). The availability of data and level of knowledge in each area is reflected in a confidence rating for that ranking (Table 2). While the prospectivity of some areas is widely acknowledged to be high (e.g. Ceduna Sub-basin), the perception of prospectivity in many basins is negatively affected by the amount or quality of data available. In these basins, the acquisition of new data or targeted research could make a significant difference to the understanding of petroleum potential and likelihood of exploration success.