River systems hold information on tectonic history in their sediment load and their morphology.
Coupled models of tectonics, topography and surface evolution help us to understand continental deformation patterns.
This project uses state-of-the-art tools in models of collision, basin formation and plate boundaries.

The recent over-ice seismic deployments in Antarctica provide datasets that enable exciting opportunities for seismological research. This project involves innovative development in passive seismology methods adapted for challenging icy conditions to unravel ice and solid Earth structure in Antarctica.

Some of the oldest continental building blocks (e.g. cratons) are found in Australia. At depth, the ancient rock record has invaluable information about the dynamics of the Earth. Seismology can provide remarkable views into the deep lithospheric structure using imaging techniques on broadband seismic data.

This research program uses laboratory experiments and geophysical imaging techniques to constrain the thickness and density structure of continental crust and investigate its relationship to mineral systems.

Congested subduction happens whenever buoyant material such as an oceanic plateau gets caught up on a moving plate and eventually arrives at a subduction zone. The buoyant material may be scraped off or subducted, but it always puts up a fight which leaves characteristic scars on the over-riding plate.

Most of Earth’s volcanism is concentrated at tectonic plate boundaries, where plates move away from one another to create mid-ocean ridges, or where one plate slides beneath another to form a subduction zone. However, an important and widespread class of volcanism occurs within plates, or across plate boundaries....

The objective of this ARC Linkage project with Geoscience Australia and GSWA is to provide a compilation of 3-D models of the crustal and lithospheric structure from new broadband data obtained with deployment of 25 seismometers in Southwest WA.

The W-phase is a ultra-long period seismic wave that arrives as early as the first-arriving P-wave. It’s early arrival, low amplitude and stability w.r.t. details of earth structure make it ideal for rapid determination of source characteristics especially for large, tsunamigenic earthquakes. We are exploring the...

The Himalaya are the world’s largest mountain belt formed in response to Cenozoic collision of the Indian continent & the Eurasian plate. This project assesses uplift history of the Himalaya, its erosional landscape response, & the preservation potential of critical mineral systems in this region.

The lowermost mantle sits atop the core-mantle boundary – the most dramatic boundary within our planet, with contrasts in physical properties that exceed those that exist at the surface. Despite significant progress, this region is not well understood, and global seismology paves the path towards new understanding.

Free oscillations (also called normal modes) are vibrational patterns of the Earth. Normal modes sense the long-wavelength structures of Earth’s interior depending on the type and mode of vibration. For example, 13S2, a spheroidal mode with radial order 13 and angular order 2, samples the Earth along its radius...

Moment tensors in seismology provide a theoretical framework to understand physical mechanisms of earthquakes (how they are generated in their source); in fact, apart from tectonic and volcanic earthquakes, the same framework is used to characterise explosions, landslides, meteorite impacts and other phenomena.

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) is an emerging passive seismic technique that converts telecommunication fibre-optic cables (dark fibres) into thousands of ground motion sensors. This project aims to harness DAS and the big data arising from it to develop unprecedented high-resolution images of the Earth's structure

Earth’s internal structure and processes, which cannot be observed directly, must be inferred from data that can be collected at (or above) Earth’s surface. Our research in Mathematical Geophysics at ANU attempts to address the question of `How to do this?' `How robust are the results? '.

To better understand how large tsunamis are generated, it is important to be able to accurately model the sea level signals they generate. A number of researchers have identified systemic discrepancies between observed and modelled tsunami wave speeds for two recent major tsunamis, the 2010 Maule and 2011 Tohoku...