The recycling of elements through convergent plate boundaries strongly influences the chemical differentiation of Earth. It is widely accepted that hydrous fluid sourced from dehydrating subducting crust promotes melting in the mantle wedge and the formation of arc magmas. We investigate the liberation of volatiles...

The amount and site of hydrogen in the upper mantle is important for understanding the geochemical recycling of volatiles, and the evolution of the mantle, atmosphere, and oceans. It has been proposed that the entire water budget of the upper mantle may be accommodated at defect sites in nominally anhydrous...

Zircon and monazite are the two most important accessory minerals in metamorphic and igneous rocks that can be dated by the U-Th-Pb method. Garnet is a key-mineral to establish metamorphic or magmatic conditions encountered by rocks. These minerals all contain significant amounts of trace elements such as Y and REE...

AusPass is a service dedicated to the acquisition, management, and distribution of passive seismological data in Australia.

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 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...

Earth is a chemically heterogeneous body. While mantle convection can be approximated as a thermally driven process, recent studies indicate that chemical heterogeneities may play an important role in governing the form and planform of mantle dynamics. Additionally, a growing body of geochemical observations argue...

Mantle convection is the principal control on Earth's thermal, chemical and geological evolution. It is central to our understanding of the origin and evolution of tectonic deformation, the thermal and compositional evolution of the mantle and, ultimately, the evolution of Earth as a whole. Plate tectonics and...

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...

Until recently, the non-dispersive shallow water wave equation has generally been thought to be adequate for modeling of deep-ocean tsunamis. Even though dispersion is obvious at trans oceanic distances, the effects on maximum tsunami height are small, and since height is normally a good criterion on which to base...

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

ARC Discovery Project 2013 Signal enhancement exploiting multiple arrays of seismic recorders will provide information on fine scale structure in the Earth that cannot be directly imaged, yet is vital for reconciling geophysical and geochemical understanding. Novel methods linking adaptive stacking, 3-...

One of the most fundamental gaps in our understanding of mantle convection lies in the dynamics of upwelling mantle flow (i.e. mantle plumes) and the signature of such flow at Earth's surface. While mantle plumes have been extensively studied, certain aspects of their evolution remain poorly understood.

Mantle convection is the `engine' that drives our dynamic Earth. It is the principal control on Earth's thermal, chemical and tectonic evolution. The mantle transition zone plays a critical role in this fundamental process, by controlling the passage of material between Earth's upper and lower mantle.

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...

The amplification of seismic waves in sedimentary basins is an important aspect of seismic hazard that is often poorly understood. This is particularly important in Indonesia, where most major cities are built on basins filled with young alluvial sediments and/or volcanic tuff.

Seismology of the deep Earth refers to studying the Earth's lower mantle and core using various seismological techniques. Seismology is the powerful tool to study the Earth's interior because the waves generated during earthquakes sample different depths and regions in the Earth's interior and carry the information...

Accurate moment tensor solutions are crucial to developing a reliable seismic hazard assessment for Indonesia. Not only are these source parameters relied on for describing the style of faulting and earthquake recurrence in a particular region, they are also critical in developing the Ground Motion Prediction...

Seismologists combine the so-called receiver functions and surface wave data to improve the general understanding of crustal and upper mantle structure in various regions of the world. An important humanitarian objective of obtaining improved structural models is better understanding of the seismicity and hazard...

The Australian Seismometers in Schools project (AuSIS) is an outreach program to install 50 research quality broadband seismometers in Australian Schools. The goal of the program is to raise awareness of geoscience through observing our dynamic earth in motion. Students are required to look after their own...

Many tsunami source inversion techniques have already been developed to derive source models with the assumption that tsunami generation is due to slip on a single large fault. Therefore, these inversion techniques cannot determine to what extent subsidiary phenomena - such as submarine landslides, block movement,...

Some of the most fundamental observations used to understand the physics of earthquakes are estimates of the spatio-temporal evolution of earthquake rupture on a fault surfaceusing seismic, tsunami and geodetic data. To date, uncertainties of rupture parameters are poorly understood, and the effect of choices such...

Eastern Indonesia is one of the least well-understood geological domains on Earth, yet the region provides a remarkable location for unraveling some of the major puzzles of plate tectonics. 30 broadband seismometers were deployed across the transition from subduction to collision from 2014-2018 to image the deep Earth.

Observations of seismic phases sampling the lower mantle have suggested Ultra Low Velocity Zones (ULVZs), a possible perovskite to postperovskite related D” layer, Large Low Shear Velocity Provinces (LLSVPs), and rolling-hills of primordial material on the core-mantle boundary (CMB).

Project summary Water resource management is one of the greatest challenges facing sustainable agriculture and urban populations across southern Australia. Key players driving catastrophic droughts in southern Australia are the tropical Indian Ocean Dipole and polar Southern Annual Mode climate systems,...