National Marine Sediments Database: Seafloor Characteristics for Australia

25,000 seafloor sediment samples with 138,000 recorded properties form Australia's first national-scale quality assessment of seafloor data. The MARS database, a collaborative project between Geoscience Australia and the National Oceans Office, provides quantitative data on grain size and carbonate content. Maps derived from the data reveal that 70% of Australia's marine domain remains unmapped by measured sediment data.

Use Cases

• Modeling sediment mobility in shallow waters based on mean grain size data.
• Mapping the distribution of seabed sediment types based on the Folk classification scheme.
• Identifying gaps in seafloor data coverage to guide future sampling efforts.
• Supporting marine spatial planning and bioregionalisation with quantitative seafloor property maps.

Strengths

• Contains approximately 25,000 sediment samples with 138,000 recorded properties.
• Represents the first project to critically assess seafloor sediment data quality and coverage on a national scale for Australia.
• Includes validated quantitative maps showing distributions of grain size, carbonate content, and sediment classification.

Limitations

• Significant gaps in measured data coverage exist, with about 70% of the total marine domain unmapped.
• Data files are in PDF and HTML formats, which are not readily machine-readable for analysis.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia Data

Collection Method

Identification, collation, and analysis of existing marine sediment data.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-14 04:28:46.751329; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Australian Marine Jurisdiction, excluding external territories, with specific focus on the Northern Planning Area.