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AusGeo News March 2007 Issue No. 85
Welcome to AusGeo News 85
This issue of AusGeo News features a wide range of articles covering petroleum prospectivity studies, mineral exploration and contributions to the mitigation of the effects of natural hazards.
A major program for Geoscience Australia is identifying the prospectivity of offshore frontier basins in the quest for a new oil province. The article on assessing prospectivity in offshore frontier basins utilises case studies from the southern Australian Margin to demonstrate how integrated basin analysis is being used at a regional scale to assess petroleum prospectivity in these areas.
There is also a report on the marine survey conducted last year in the Central North West Shelf. The survey involved sampling within areas of potential hydrocarbon migration and seepage to the seafloor.
New geoscience datasets developed during the Tanami-North Australia Project will provide a better understanding of the evolution and metallogenesis of this area. For mineral explorers the most important result from the Tanami deep seismic survey was the correlation of the position of known mineral fields with the surface projection of crustal-penetrating shear zones on the seismic section.
There are several reports relating to the mitigation of natural hazards. We can now refine our estimates of earthquake ground-shaking at a given distance from an earthquake rupture and this provides the potential to rapidly assess earthquake impact for disaster response.
Geoscience Australia staff with GIS expertise contributed to the emergency response to the severe Victorian bushfires between December 2006 and January 2007. During this assignment Geoscience Australia staff developed an innovative method to show critical information in a 3D visual environment. During the bushfire emergency period, Geoscience Australia’s Sentinel bushfire monitoring system experienced a major load as emergency managers and communities used it to source information. Sentinel is the internet based mapping tool which provides timely information on the location of bushfires throughout Australia.
New products reported on in this issue include; new geophysical datasets covering areas in Western Australia, the Northern Territory, Queensland and New South Wales, a major price reduction in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) products and the Near-Pristine Estuaries database.
As always, we appreciate your feedback and encourage you to use the online rating mechanism below each article.
Dr Neil Williams
CEO Geoscience Australia