Experts in geodynamics, geophysics & geology tell you what you need to know

On the morning of September 22, a magnitude-5.9 earthquake struck approximately 130 km northeast of Melbourne. Seismic waves were felt in Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Adelaide, and as far south as Tasmania.

Caroline Eakin

Meghan S. Miller

Australian Seismometers in Schools

Lake Eyre Basin

Like a tree falling in the forest, if there is no one around to feel it, then an earthquake goes unnoticed. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Originally published in Temblor Earthquake News,  September 25, 2021.

Australia surprised by moderate quake, but rumbling is not unusual

A team of Australian researchers are about to set off on a landmark voyage to discover more about the Earth beneath our oceans, and what triggers underwater earthquakes. Read live updates of the cruise as they go — both personal reflections and scientific background to the cruise.

Louis Moresi

Updates An article in EOS, the scientific magazine of the AGU by Hrvoje Tkalčić, Caroline Eakin and others

 (Note: this post is updated when new diary entries are posted  — LM)

Mike Coffin's blog at the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies, UTas The research voyage is aimed at shedding light on Macquarie Island’s underlying structure and geological evolution, while also enabling monitoring of future earthquakes and

Probing the Australian-Pacific Plate Boundary: Macquarie Ridge in 3D (Updated)

The Australian Air Force flew 100 years of aircraft through the centre of Canberra on March 31st and we recorded their seismic signal from the Parliament House Basement

Voon Hui Lai

Chengxin Jiang

Voon Hui Lai, Chengxin Jiang, Caroline Eakin, and Meghan Miller analyzed seismograms of the Royal Australian Air Force #RAAF100 spectacular aircraft fly-past in Canberra on March 31st. Here is the recording from the seismometer at Parliament House basement and one from a temporary seismic node deployed at ANU by Chengxin Jiang. We clearly observe different signals from jet engine aircraft versus the propellor aircraft.

Seismic Fly-past of the Century

This is a transcript of a podcast with Oliver Strimpel from GeologyBites. We chat about the challenges and benefits of reconstructing Earth evolution over a billion years.

Dietmar Muller

This post is based on a podcast with Oliver Strimpel from GeologyBites. We discuss the motivation, challenges and benefits of reconstructing Earth evolution over a billion years. Oliver Strimpel, who runs GeologyBites, is former astrophysicist and museum director, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford University.

 OS

: The theory of plate tectonics has been widely accepted for about fifty years.

Chatting about reconstructing 1 billion years of Earth evolution in Geology Bites podcast

Continents host the oldest building blocks of the Earth's surface and keep a record of the processes that shaped it. A careful reading and high-performance computational modelling of the early, hotter Earth reveal a coming of age story.

fabio capitanio

Thermochemical lithosphere differentiation and the origin of cratonic mantle

Building and Destroying Continental Mantle

Our understanding of the formation of an atmosphere, ocean deeps and mountain highs and the life that thrives on it, mostly relies on our understanding of tectonics on Earth.

The Earth's troubled childhood

The earth system provides many crucial services essential to the wealth and health of human society. It provides both the climate and the platform on which we live, the mineral, energy and groundwater resources on which we depend and increasingly a repository for our wastes.

Mike Sandiford

Rising demand for resources, declining discovery rates, concerns about resource security, carbon pollution and global equity issues, challenge us to deliver a new level of understanding of these crucial earth-system services both now and into the future. In particular, the provision of cheap and secure, reliable and sustainable energy without compromising the climate system will be predicated on our success in meeting this grand, new challenge.

Motivations 3: Earth system services

As the children of the plate tectonic revolution, today’s geoscientists have grown up with a zeal to understand the basic workings of our planet. There are many remarkable testimonies to the success of plate tectonics including declining discovery rates of large mineral  resources.

In acknowledging our remarkable success we may now need a different metaphor to encourage and inspire future generations of geoscientists. I suggest an appropriate metaphor relates to how we put our understanding of planetary dynamics to the benefit of all people and particularly to the issue of sustainability. Scientists carry the purpose and enthusiasms that infused their training.

Motivations 2: Children of the revolution

About 13,000 years ago, as their land was drowning, the last Vicmanians were confronted a terrible choice. Through human induced climate change we are now committing a similar fate. Unlike the Vicmanians, in foreseeing the future we can do something about it [1].

Who could imagine what the last Vicmanians thought confronted with the terrible reality their land was drowning? The Vicmanians occupied what is now Bass Strait for the first 30,000 years or so of human occupation of Australia. Prior to 10,000 years ago, sea levels were lower than today and Bass Straight was largely exposed. At the height of the last ice age, about 18,000 years ago, sea levels were  130 metres lower.

Motivations 1: Lessons for an uncertain future

Haibin Yang, Louis Moresi and Mark Quigley provide a scaling relationship for the fault spacing in continental strike-slip shear zones.

Haibin Yang

Mark Quigley

We have all become highly sensitive to 'social distancing' since the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the Earth. The act of  social distancing (more correctly called 'physical distancing') is to keep a safe space between yourself and other people who are not from your household.

How is 'social distancing' maintained between strike-slip faults?

... probably the most challenging feature in the global ocean on which to deploy ocean bottom seismometers, which need to land onto a relatively flat surface ...

Hrvoje Tkalčić

The furious fifties have certainly lived up to the acclaim they received. We have had to change our plan of voyage multiple times, and have lost precious time due to heaving-to the vessel to a favorable position with respect to the wind and swell direction, and on the lee side of the Macca island.

Probing the Australian-Pacific Plate Boundary (Pt 6: A race against time in sub-Antarctic waters)

Integration of passive seismic images, geochemistry, and reconstruction of uplift from river profiles provide new findings on arc-continent collisional processes

Eastern Indonesia is one of the least well-understood geological domains on Earth, yet the region is one of the few tectonic settings that is actively undergoing arc-continent collision. The NSF funded “Banda arc experiment” was designed to unravel some of the complex dynamics of convergent tectonics.

The inherited structures within the Australian lithosphere define the tectonic evolution along the Banda arc

Rare Earth Elements are critical for low-carbon transport and energy generation. What are they, how do we find them and extract them ?

Geo ★ Down Under Contributors

On a quest for critical metal resources that are required for our electric, low carbon future, what are the challenges we face ?  In two recent talks, economic geologists Simon Jowitt (UNLV) and John Mavrogenes (ANU) gave their perspectives on what we need to do to find the

 Rare Earth Elements

that we are going to need.

Earth science on a quest for critical metals

When you are pressed for time, the only thing you hope for is for things to go as smoothly as possible so that you can move on.

The period of extremely bad 48 hours of weather was approaching, and I had high hopes that we would be able to complete two more sites before high swell hits us and completely puts us out of action. The site MRO21 (Macquarie Ridge Ocean 21) was no different from other deployment sites on this voyage.

Probing the Australian-Pacific Plate Boundary (Pt 7: The hunt for MRO21)

The Earth’s crust is made up of tectonic plates that are constantly in motion. Large, destructive earthquakes occur when accumulated energy at plate boundaries - where two plates are pushing against each other - is suddenly released.

Babak Hejrani

Earthquakes rupture on faults that cut through the Earth crustal layers (e.g. Fig. 1). Shallow earthquakes occur when seismic activity takes place within the top 30km of the earth's crust and they account for majority of the Earth's seismic activity.

Shallow earthquakes in Australia

Three and a half days after our departure from Hobart, we arrived in just northeast of the Macquarie island and instantly proceeded with swathing – mapping the ocean floor in the north-eastern quadrant, in lines parallel to the Macquarie ridge.

According to the original plan, ocean-bottom seismometers should be deployed only after swathing and determining the best locations on the ocean floor. Our preference is soft sediments so that the instruments could be firmly coupled to the ocean floor. This is somewhat different from the choices we would make on land. We have to combine the multibeam sonar images with back-scatter images – both acoustic methods for mapping.

Probing the Australian-Pacific Plate Boundary (Pt 5: Underwater array observatory at the Macquarie Ridge)

We (the team of 9 scientists and technicians from the Australian National University’s Research School of Earth Sciences) are out of strict 2-week quarantine and ready for a pre-voyage mobilisation. This includes a series of inductions and briefings prior to boarding, boarding, and final stages of preparation for the voyage.

Probing the Australian-Pacific Plate Boundary (Pt 2 — On the Deck)

C' shear bands and S-C fabric in naturally deformed rocks in thin section (left) and outcrop (right). Images are from the Zanskar Shear Zone, NW Himalaya (St = staurolite, Bt = biotite, Qtz = quartz).Schematic diagram of S-C fabric and C' shear bands in ductile shear zones under dextral simple shear in the XZ-plane of the finite strain ellipsoidC' shear bands are a common feature of ductile shear zones and are widely used as kinematic

Melanie Finch

C' shear bands are a common feature of ductile shear zones and are widely used as kinematic indicators. They are also enigmatic: research on naturally- and experimentally- deformed rocks has suggested several theories as to why they form, but there is little consensus.

Enigmatic C’ shear bands: their evolution and demise

This isn’t a painting or a stained-glass window — it’s a microscope image of light shining through the Earth’s mantle (image from the author, Heather Handley)

Heather Handley

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Volcanic activity is a constant global threat. It’s estimated over 1 billion people live within the potential, direct impact range of volcanic eruptions. Just recently, lava flows from the eruption of Mount Nyiragongo, a volcano in the Democratic Republic of Congo, killed 32 people, with many more missing.

Photos from the field: the stunning crystals revealing deep secrets about Australian volcanoes

Staff from the Australian Antarctic Division are now installing seismometers on the Macquarie island as part of the "Macquarie Ridge in the 3D" project.

Finally, our long wait has come to an end. It is great to see the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) Macquarie Island expedition team now installing our seismometers on the Macquarie island as part of the "Macquarie Ridge in the 3D" project. Comprising 27 ocean-bottom-seismometer locations, our passive seismic array is now being reinforced by five more land instruments on the island itself.

Unlocking the secrets of the sub-Antarctic underground

Ben Mather

Modelling temperature in the Earth’s crust is accomplished by populating a geological model with thermal properties, such as thermal conductivity and rates of heat production, and solving a numerical model of thermal diffusion with assigned boundary conditions.

Turning up the heat on Earth temperature modelling — AuScope

Zenodo is a repository for immutable versions of software that are provided with a persistent DOI for the purposes of citation and reproducibility. Underworld can be cited via a zenodo DOI.

Underworld is on Zenodo

Inter-source correlograms yield coherent signals upon careful consideration of source mechanisms and source-receiver geometry, affording new means of characterizing planetary interiors.

Our latest paper, published in J. Geophys. Res. has just been featured in the

 EOS

Editors’ Highlights section: Sheng Wang and I demonstrate how to scan the interiors of Earth, other solid planets and moons with a single receiver in the presence of some seismicity caused by quakes and meteoroid impacts.

Source Selection Essential to Inter-Source Cross-Correlation

Buoyant material rising in the Earth's mantle is expected to spread out when it reaches the base of a tectonic plate like pancake batter dropped into a pan.

Tim Stern

Tim Stern and Simon Lamb Victoria University of Wellington

Mapping the variation of mantle seismic wave speeds with direction – giving rise to seismic anisotropy - is a powerful method to determine patterns of mantle flow. This work can also explain regions where seismic wave speeds are unusually high.

High mantle seismic P-wave-speeds as a signature for pancake-like flow in the upper mantle

Katie Cooper,  Rebecca Farrington and Meghan Miller explain how cratonic lithosphere can be sculpted by flow from a passing subducting slab.

Cratons are regions of the Earth's crust that have been relatively stable for more than a couple of billion years. This stability is remarkable — the strong tectonic plates in the ocean are, after all, recycled into the deep mantle in less than a tenth of this time. In Figure 1, the cratons are marked as blue patches of thick lithosphere.

On the destructive tendencies of cratons

2022 was an exciting year for deep Earth and planetary sciences communities.

As the Earth's interior image continued getting sharper, far away, on our planetary neighbour's surface, InSight lost its power but provided continuing records for years of research.

2022, IN A NUTSHELL

Brian Kennett

Rhodri Davies

Eastern Australia hosts a wide range of volcanic edifices, ranging from localised outcrops to lava fields and central volcanoes (Figure 1). In general, the older volcanics are in the north with distinct tracks of decreasing age to the south (see Figure 1 and, e.g., Davies et al., 2015). Similar age profiles are seen for two lines of seamounts through the Tasman Sea (e.g., Seton et al., 2019). This pattern of age progression reflects the rapid

East Australian Volcanism – interaction of plumes and subduction remnants

Earth’s tectonic plates are constantly moving. Over millions of years new plates form at oceanic ridges, while others form mountains or even sink back in the mantle and disappear from the surface. The unique geochemical signature of sunken plates can be preserved and reappear in newly formed crust.

Marianne Richter

The Arctic Ocean is roughly 14,000 km away from Melbourne (Monash University, Australia), where most of the action for our recent publication ‘An Early Cretaceous subduction-modified mantle underneath the ultraslow spreading Gakkel Ridge, Arctic Ocean’ in

 Science Advances

took place.

Unusual geochemical signature in Arctic ocean floor basalts

One hundred researchers will receive Australian Government funding to focus on finding solutions for key industry challenges and training the next generation of researchers under the ARC Future Fellowships scheme.

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Australian Research Council (ARC), Professor Sue Thomas, has welcomed today’s announcement by Minister of Education and Youth the Hon Alan Tudge MP of $93 million in funding for the new Future Fellows for 2021.

Australian Research Council Future Fellowships 2021

Making your research reproducible means that you provide the entire workflow from data, through software and post-processing freely available. Not only can somebody repeat your experiments and verify them, they can build upon them. In lab-based disciplines, there are many further challenges, but in research that is predominantly based on data processing, this ought to be an achievable goal.

Alaska Moho Model (Reproducible research with containers)

A new study by an international team of scientists has found lockdown measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 led to a 50 per cent…

A


 new study by an international team of scientists


 has found lockdown measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 led to a 50 per cent reduction in seismic noise observed around the world.

It is the largest reduction in human-generated noise ever observed globally.

COVID lockdowns and seismic noise in Australia

People naturally focus on big news and Geo-scientists also pay more attentions to big earthquakes happening in plate boundaries rather than the 'boring' small earthquakes in stable continents. Does this mean the intraplate earthquakes are negligible in scientific research?

Surface slip distributions and geometric complexity of intraplate reverse-faulting earthquakes

Surface-Rupturing Historical Earthquakes in Australia and Their Environmental Effects: New Insights from Re-Analyses of Observational Data

A recent comprehensive study on the surface-rupturing earthquakes in Australian stable continental regions by Yang et al. (2021) shows contrasting features between intraplate and interplate earthquakes.  Being far from plate boundaries, it generates a relatively low strain rate ( $&lt; 10^{-16} s^{-1}$)  that yields a recurrence time of large intraplate earthquakes &gt;1000s years, which is much longer than the instrument record history.

Do Australian earthquakes matter?

Timor-Leste and Indonesia were battered by tropical cyclone Seroja over the Easter period. Seven days of heavy rain and wind caused severe flooding and landslides.

Brendan Duffy

Contributing Authors:
 

Brendan Duffy

 1

, Oktoviano Vegas Tilman De Jesus

 2

, Mark Quigley

 1

, Lisa Palmer

 1

, Demetrio Amaral Carvalho

 3

, Josh Trindade

 4

, Ian Rutherfurd

 1


 The School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Melbourne


 Vice president - Instituto do Petroleo e Geologia, Dili, Timor-Leste


 Secretary of

Flooding And Landsliding In Timor-Leste: Linked Hazards In A Young Mountain Belt

Recently, AuScope invested in a suite of Large-N or nodal seismometers, which are capable of recording seismic noise at local-, rather than regional-, scale, allowing seismologists to focus on imaging geological features like faults and aquifers.

This article was originally published by AuScope, Australia’s provider of research infrastructure to the Earth and Geospatial Science community. AuScope is an Australian Government (NCRIS) organisation that has enabled the research, or research infrastructure, described here.

Author: Meghan Miller, edited by Jo Condon.

Testing AuScope’s next-gen seismometers at Mt Stromlo

“Below 40 degrees south there is no law, and below 50 degrees south there is no God."

So we departed Hobart yesterday at 1pm local time, heading south. Our destination is the location where the ocean bottom seismometers (OBS) will be sunk to the ocean floor over the area of about 1,000 square kilometers near the Macquarie island. Spending a rough first night in the middle of the “roaring forties”, I am thinking about how our days will look like when we reach the fifties.

Probing the Australian-Pacific Plate Boundary (Pt 3 — A voyage to the furious fifties)

Meghan S. Miller,

 Australian National University

and Louis Moresi,

 Australian National University

Our responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have dramatically changed human activity all over the world. People are working from home, schools are closed in many places, travel is restricted, and in some cases only essential shops and businesses are open. Scientists see signs of these changes wherever they look.

Australian cities are quiet during lockdown. Earthquake scientists are making the most of it

Adam Beall

Cratons are anomalously-strong regions of the continents that have largely resisted tectonic forces for billions of years. How such strong zones could be forged in a hot, low-viscosity, low stress, early-Earth has been a long-standing puzzle for geologists. Adam Beall, Katie Cooper and Louis Moresi have recently proposed that cratons were made by the catastrophic switching on of plate tectonics.

Craton Formation and the Onset of Plate Tectonics

Last week's Woods Point earthquake in Victoria was a quite a surprise for most Australians outside the geophysical community and even among Earth scientists, an event of this magnitude was unexpected.

What do earthquakes like this one teach us about  the structure and dynamics of the Australian crust ?  This is a collection of news articles and other resources about last week's earthquake that discuss the event itself, put it into a geological and geophysical context and gives an insight into the people behind the science.

Victorian Earthquake Round-up

The transition to a low-carbon / below-zero-emissions future presents many challenges for the industries "behind the scenes" that provide the raw materials for the innovative technical solutions that will become a part of our everyday lives.

There is a rapidly growing demand for the "

 critical metals"

that are needed electronics  and ultra-strong magnets but there is also a huge demand for the bronze-age staple,

 copper

, which we need for all the transmission wires, motor windings and transformers of our electrified, low-carbon economy.

Metals for an Electrifying Future

When the seismic waves from a distant earthquake arrive in the vicinity of a seismic recording station they interact with the local structure and produce a variety of minor contributions accompanying the main arrival of a seismic phase.

Significant changes in physical properties produce conversions between compressional (P) and shear (S) waves. The Earth’s surface also returns energy to depth that can be reflected back to the surface. Analysis of this chain of conversions and reverberations yields information about the structure beneath the station. The most common approach is the use of receiver functions that exploit the conversions and so can map out major interfaces.

Imaging the full lithosphere with earthquake sources

Earth Science - everyone should know a little, but it is also important for Australia to have access to deep expertise.

The COVID-19 border closures and the financial shocks to Australian Universities that followed have been felt especially hard in Earth Science departments around the country. In a series of articles over the next few weeks, we are going to explore some of the deep-seated reasons why our discipine has been impacted disproportionately, and how we can strengthen Earth Sciences for the future.

Australian Earth Science facing a very uncertain future (updated)

AuScope is building Australia’s Downward Looking Telescope, a sophisticated and integrated research infrastructure system that helps researchers address national decadal geoscience challenges. Here is all you need to know about the DLT.

Tim Rawling

AuScope’s Downward Looking Telescope (DLT) is the Australian geoscience research community’s vision for a futureproof research infrastructure system to support Australia’s sustainable future. Image: AuScope

 This article was originally published by AuScope, Australia’s provider of research infrastructure to the Earth and Geospatial Science community.

Building Australia's Downward Looking Telescope

I am locked in a small hotel in Hobart turned into a quarantine, tempted to write a story named “Tasmanian quarantine”, but, honestly, I can’t.   I could lament how unlucky, or brag how courageous we are to endure this isolation. I could show you how tiny the room is, in which I feel I could touch all corners at once if I stretched my hands and legs wide enough.

Probing the Australian-Pacific Plate Boundary: Macquarie Ridge in 3D (Part 1 - Quarantine ?)

Proposed mechanisms for Cenozoic landscape evolution in southwestern North America (SWNA) include crustal isostasy, dynamic topography, or lithosphere tectonics, but their relative contributions remain controversial.

Neng Lu

https://doi.org/10.59350/c48c6-j2e14  Proposed mechanisms for Cenozoic landscape evolution in southwestern North America (SWNA) include crustal isostasy, dynamic topography, or lithosphere tectonics, but their relative contributions remain controversial. Recently our study 'Coupled influence of tectonics, climate, and surface processes on landscape evolution in southwestern North America' published in Nature Communications tried to address that.

Cenozoic landscape evolution in southwestern North America

Distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS, is a newly developed passive seismic technology that can transform telecommunication fibre-optic cable into linear arrays of ground motion sensors.

How DAS is used in seismology   By attaching a DAS integrator unit, in the example above a Silixa iDAS that is part of the AuScope ANSIR equipment pool, to a fibre optic cable, the entire cable becomes a sensing element. As a seismic wave disturbs the ground, the cable is stretched and compressed.

Lighting Up Dark Fibre for Seismic Imaging

Professor Will Featherstone passed away on 13 May 2022 in Perth after a brief illness. He was 54 at the time he died but he had behind him a thirty year research and teaching track record and over twenty years as full Professor in Geodesy.

Will was one of Australia's best known and most highly regarded researchers in physical geodesy specialising in precise computation of the Geoid and the Vertical Datum. Throughout his research career, he was based at Curtin University in Western Australia but he achieved international recognition as an innovative thinker and as a leader of his community. Will was born in England in 1967 and he grew up in Prestatyn in North Wales.

William Edward (Will) Featherstone

I plunged headfirst into a commitment to post a picture from my research once a day for 100 days, beginning on the first day of semester two, 2021.

The career of an academic is filled with peaks and troughs. We have periods where we're rolling in grant funds, and then many years of no funding. We have high impact papers accepted with minor revisions, and then a string of rejections.

100 days of geoscience

How we built a simple dashboard using Github actions with open source software and openly available (FAIR) data.

Meghan S. Miller,

 Australian National University

and Louis Moresi,

 Australian National University


 
 How we built a simple dashboard using Github actions with open source software and openly available (FAIR) data.
 

(Originally published at www.underworldcode.org - we have updated this article to reflect a whole year of the dashboard and the different lockdowns across the country) We wrote an article in

Australian Seismometers in Schools - Noise monitoring dashboard

Sima Mousavi

If we were lucky to travel to the Earth’s centre, perhaps as part of an international crew of terranauts chosen to observe and investigate our planet’s interior… just before entering the molten core, we would insist on making a “must stop” of our journey, almost like one of those vista points you can’t resist making a stop at, cruising along some imaginary coastal highway.

Seeking The Truth Hidden In The Earth’s Lowermost Mantle

Hands-on experiments explore the details of thermochemical convection. Build your own Lava Lamp and learn why the continents don't get sucked down into the deep Earth.

Rebecca Farrington

In the 1960s, the mesmerising, dancing fluids of the ubiquitous

 Astro Lamp

(better known as the

 Lava Lamp

) symbolised a future of endless peace and prosperity when everyone would live the glamorous life of the international jet set.

Lava Lamps &amp; Thermochemical Convection

In these one-dimensional (1D) models, the Earth (or, as a matter of fact, any other planet) is divided into kilometres thick spherical layers, just like an onion on a much smaller scale

Traveltimes for global earthquake location and phase identification

Constraints on seismic velocities in the Earth from traveltimes

Preliminary reference Earth model

Image credit: CLAUS LUNAU / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY: https://www.sciencephoto.com/

Unlike fashion models, who have stylists and artists crafting their appearance, geophysicists construct structural models of the Earth by using mathematical tools, observations and simulations of seismic waves propagating through the Earth's interior, from its surface to the core.

New Reference Earth Model: CCREM

ARC Chief Executive Officer, Professor Sue Thomas, has welcomed the approval by the Minister for Education and Youth, the Hon Alan Tudge MP of $83 million in funding through the ARC’s Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) scheme.

The Australian Research Council (ARC) will be supporting 196 new early career research projects in Australian Government priority areas such as advanced manufacturing, cyber security, defence, food, beverage and agribusiness, medical technologies and pharmaceuticals, mining equipment, resource technology and services, critical minerals processing, oil, gas and energy resources, recycling and clean energy and space.

Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards in Geoscience, 2022

Australian earthquakes pose a high consequence – low likelihood risk that is widespread across the continent but is often not well characterised for some of Australia’s most important infrastructure.

Adam Pascale

Dee Ninis

Mark Quigley

 1,2

, Adam Pascale

 2

, Wayne Peck

 2

, Dee Ninis

 2

, Elodie Borleis

 2

, Russell Cuthbertson

 2


 (1) School of Geography, Earth &amp;

How earthquake science supports decision-making in the ancient continent

Seismic waves are being recorded in more detail than ever before. In this latest collaboration with the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN), researchers from The ANU and AuScope’s Earth Imaging and Sounding Program explain Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) infrastructure .

This article was originally published by AuScope, Australia’s provider of research infrastructure to the Earth and Geospatial Science community. AuScope is an Australian Government (NCRIS) organisation that has enabled the research, or research infrastructure, described here. Authors:

Voon Hui Lai and Meghan Miller, edited by Philomena Manifold.

Distributed Acoustic Sensing in Australia's Downward Looking Telescope

Members of the National Committee for Earth Sciences of the Australian Academy of Science are deeply concerned by the systematic reduction in staff members in geosciences departments over the last year in Australia.

The National Committee for Earth Sciences (NCES) aims to foster Earth sciences in Australia, link the Academy to Australian Earth scientists and relevant scientific societies, and serve as a link between Australian and overseas Earth scientists, primarily through the International Union for Quaternary Research, the International Union for Geodesy and Geophysics and the International Union for Geological Sciences.

Australian Academy of Science Statement on Declining Funding for University Earth Science

Australia is losing capacity in geoscience education and research at a time it is most needed. Six of Australia's most influential Earth scientists offer their solutions.

Samuel C Boone

Peter Betts

Unprecedented climatic, environmental, energy, and resource crises threaten our world due to a growing, unsustainable human footprint on our planet. But while Australia awaits national strategies to address climate change amidst the COVID-induced recession, deep staffing cuts and closures of tertiary geoscience programmes across the country compromise our collective ability to respond to these challenges.

Australia’s geoscience paradox threatens its prosperity and sustainability

Mantle plumes are the best explanation we have for much of Earth's intraplate volcanism but some remain doubtful despite 50 years of rigorous testing.

Tim Jones

Note: this article is a repost from the author's personal website with minor edits and additions

Earth's mantle contains plumes, or columns of buoyant rock, that rise from deep within to produce volcanism at its surface. That is not a controversial statement among most Earth scientists. But, in keeping with scientific tradition, the idea has always had its skeptics.

A response to Gillian Foulger's argument against mantle plumes on Oliver Strimpel's podcast

In Eastern Asia, Jurassic and Cretaceous intraplate volcanism and magmatism differ in their spatial distribution and composition. A combination of plate kinematic and geodynamic models provides clues for their causes.

Most massive volcanic eruptions on Earth are caused either by mantle plumes, deep-seated cylindrical upwellings originating deep in Earth’s mantle, or are part of the volcanic “ring of fire” above subduction zones where oceanic plates are recycled back into the mantle.

Geo★ Down Under

Photos from the field: the stunning crystals revealing deep secrets about Australian volcanoes

Australian cities are quiet during lockdown. Earthquake scientists are making the most of it