Hazard Earthquake

Aerial image of a surface rupture several kilometers long from the Meckering earthquake
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Geoscience Australia’s Community Safety team supports Australia’s ability to manage the impact of earthquakes and helps inform decisions about risk.

We contribute to each stage of the emergency management cycle to help improve preparedness, response and recovery with our focus on contributing towards community safety.

Historic image of a railway now permanently bent into a wiggled shape, still in parallel, though unusable, as a result of the Meckering earthquake in 1968.

Our role

We operate the National Earthquake Alerts Centre to provide around the clock monitoring, analysis and alerting of significant earthquakes to the emergency management sector. To help understand what could be at threat from earthquakes, we provide exposure information about buildings, demographics, community infrastructure and agricultural commodities.

Our nation-wide seismic hazard assessment defines the level of earthquake ground shaking across Australia that has a specified likelihood of being exceeded across a given time period.

This information is used by building standards and decision makers to develop mitigation strategies so that communities can be more resilient to earthquake events.

We also use this information to provide advice to government on seismic hazards that may impact infrastructure projects for a low-carbon economy.

We also provide around the clock access to data about people, property and infrastructure potentially exposed. Our information aids in providing an understanding of the situation to targeted preparedness, response and recovery efforts.

Our products, tools and data provide a better understanding of hazard vulnerabilities for all sectors to plan, prepare and reduce exposure to natural hazards improving preparedness now and into the future.

Emerging capabilities

We engage with different sectors to provide assessments and address new challenges as they emerge.

  • Our Researchers are committed to growing our knowledge base to prepare for challenges of the future.

  • We continue to improve knowledge on potentially active faults across Australia and are developing a database of earthquake ground-motion data for engineering applications

  • We have a strong attendance at conferences and events to maintain awareness of the challenges faced by the community safety sector and keep up to date with latest science.

  • Our open-source data is accessed by developers interested in solving operational challenges of reducing vulnerability and exposure to natural hazards.

The streetscape of the town of York

Case study Assessing the resilience of ageing buildings against earthquake hazards

How our collaborations and science improved the safety of communities in York, Western Australia.

Denese Smythe
The results will not only be useful for York, they will enable the refinement and adaptation of the retrofit information for wider application to similar buildings elsewhere in the State and nation.

Cr. Denese Smythe

York Shire President