Marine Geophysical Survey Data for the Australian Region, 1970s Onwards

Since the 1970s, this compilation contains gravity, magnetic, and bathymetry ship-track line data from Geoscience Australia and other institutions. The data has been levelled to reduce errors between intersecting surveys and is organized in ASCII files by survey with approximately 150-meter record spacing. The levelling work was performed by Desmond FitzGerald & Associates from 1998-2001 and Ron Hackney in 2009-2011, with final review by Yvette Poudjom Djomani.

Use Cases

• Modeling seafloor geology and tectonic structures based on gravity and magnetic anomalies.
• Creating integrated bathymetric maps of the Australian region from levelled ship-track data.
• Calibrating regional geophysical models using data levelled to reduce errors between surveys.

Strengths

• Data spans multiple decades, with surveys acquired since the 1970s.
• Includes both unlevelled source data and levelled data for integration.
• Levelling process reduces errors between surveys of various vintages.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic and temporal bias inherent to the ship-track survey sources.

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia marine geophysical survey database 'Mardat' and other institutions.

Collection Method

Compilation and levelling of ship-track survey data.

Time Range

1970s onwards

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-04 06:46:17.317125; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Australian region