The Australian Government's Innovation Report

In 2005-06, Geoscience Australia strengthened Australia’s ability to generate ideas and created new knowledge as it:
• built new investment opportunities in south-western and northern Australia in support of the 2006
offshore petroleum acreage release, and helped the quest for a new oil province for Australia by acquiring
and interpreting marine and seismic survey data;
• supported national initiatives in critical infrastructure protection by establishing a spatial information, risk
analysis and modelling capability;
• improved natural risk assessment by developing a framework for risk assessment models, methods and
databases in support of the Disaster Mitigation Australia Package;
• supported the development of regional marine plans by providing marine geoscience advice to government;
• strengthened Australia’s seismic and geodetic monitoring capability in the South-East Asian region to better
understand the region’s tectonics and seismic hazards;
• improved access to pre-competitive geoscience information and compilations by accelerating development
of internet-based delivery systems;
• created new opportunities for mineral exploration through the provision of new pre-competitive
geoscience information for the Gawler, Paterson, Tanami provinces and the Lachlan Fold Belt of Eastern
Australia (Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania);
• provided timely and relevant technical advice to government on a range of minerals-related issues
throughout the year;
• completed phase III of the preservation of deteriorating seismic records in the national archive of
petroleum industry data;
• helped develop options for geological sequestration of carbon dioxide through the Greenhouse Gas
Technologies Cooperative Research Centre and provided technical advice on carbon capture and storage
to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions;
• completed the 1:100 000 pilot mapping programme to address areas of high bushfire risk; and
• completed phase I of the Australian Marine Spatial Information System (AMSIS) pertaining to the
Australian Marine Jurisdiction.
More information about Geoscience Australia and its programmes and activities can be found at:
www.ga.gov.au
Moving mountains
Antarctic worker
Damien Gildea on top
of Mount Craddock.
Photo credit:
Geoscience Australia
‘So here we are, standing 4650 metres above sea level atop Mount Craddock, Antarctica’s 4th
highest mountain. Or so we thought...’
These were the words of Antarctic worker Damien Gildea when he received notification from
the online global positioning system (GPS) processing service AUSPOS that the peak he
had just climbed was not quite as high as he expected. According to the GPS data Damien
had just input to AUSPOS, Mt Craddock is in fact only 4368 metres high, falling some
282 metres short of the anticipated high of 4650 metres.
AUSPOS is a free service provided by Geoscience Australia that enables users to submit
GPS data via the internet and rapidly receive accurate geodetic coordinates to international standard.
Increasingly, the spatial information sector is turning to the internet as a tool to aid its activities. As a freely
available service, AUSPOS encourages consistency of all precise coordinates used by the public and private
sector GPS community.
The AUSPOS service takes advantage of the Australian Regional GPS Network and the International GPS
network, and can be used for GPS data collected anywhere on Earth.
36 Backing Australia’s Ability