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,...

The Southern Ocean is characterised by turbulent flow associated with the world's strongest ocean current, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC). This turbulence is dominated by mesoscale eddies vortices which are small (~50km) compared with the size of the Southern Ocean. Mesoscale eddies play a variety of roles...

Expedition 342 of the IODP

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...

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...

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...

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-...

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.

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 Virtual Earth describes the real or material Earth - it is an electronic rendition of our planet as it is today. The aspect upon which we have specifically focussed is the geometric description of the planetary lithosphere, in particular the 3D geometry of the major subducting slabs. These geometries have been...

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...