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Project details
| Title: | Improving the national bathymetry grid, Hobart to Brisbane, Resourcing Australia’s Prosperity |
| Id: | 2666 |
| Investigator(s): | Robin Beaman
James Cook University [details] |
| Description: | This project seeks to improve the quality of seabed mapping off Australia’s eastern continental shelf, in an area of particular benefit to efforts to produce a morphologically sound national dataset of Australia’s seabed. Geoscience Australia’s Resourcing Australia’s Prosperity initiative (RAPi) is a 35-year (2024–2059) investment by the Australian Government, with $3.4 billion committed over the first decade, to accelerate the discovery of resources necessary for Australia’s net zero transition and a key component of the Future Made in Australia policy. RAPi will produce Australia-wide foundational geoscience datasets, including integrated bathymetric and topographic grids, and seabed feature maps. Offshore, foundational geoscience dataset requirements for RAPi include national and regional bathymetry and seabed feature maps, which build on historic work by Geoscience Australia (GA) and Dr Robin Beaman at James Cook University to produce the AusBathyTopo series of gridded data products in Australia’s marine jurisdiction and surrounding waters. In data-poor areas, such as the deep waters of the Tasman Sea basin, poor-quality legacy data may be the only data available, which results in significant artefacts in the processed surface, even at low resolutions. The objective of this project is to re-survey the RV Maurice Ewing (EW0201) track from Hobart to Brisbane, originally surveyed in 2002 using an Atlas HydroSweep DS system that generated a wide strip of very poorly resolved seafloor with unresolvable vessel motion artefacts in depths ~4000 m in the Tasman Sea basin. The strip is highly visible in the current national AusBathyTopo grid and will affect planned regional AusBathyTopo grids in the region if the data cannot be replaced. This project will resurvey the EW0201 transit with modern deep water multibeam methods. The new multibeam data will be used to update the AusBathyTopo series, specifically the annually released national 250 m grid, and for planned future 30 m grids along the NSW coast that intersect the EW0201 transit. Replacing the poor EW0201 data with high-quality RV Investigator multibeam data will significantly improve the morphological integrity of AusBathyTopo grids along eastern Australia. This improved knowledge will advance seabed feature mapping for Australian Government priorities that include better understanding of seabed morphology for Australian Marine Parks and natural hazard modelling. Since AusBathyTopo grids will be used to improve GEBCO global products, the improved dataset will be widely used in global applications. |
| Years: | 2026 |
List of surveys that this project was on.
Use [details] link to view survey details (map, reports, metadata etc) including links to download data.
| Survey | Investigator | Description |
|---|---|---|
| IN2026_T03 [details] |
Robin Beaman | The primary objective of this transit voyage is to relocate Investigator from Hobart to Brisbane. In addition, there are three supplementary projects and two piggyback projects included in the voyage. |