Australian Maritime Boundaries 2014a: Legal Limits and Zones

Geoscience Australia's digital representation of Australia's maritime limits and boundaries as established under the Seas and Submerged Lands Act 1973. The dataset includes the continental shelf, Exclusive Economic Zone, territorial sea, and baselines, with coordinates in the GDA94 datum. This version, updated in May 2014, incorporates technical amendments and includes two versions of the EEZ to account for a discrepancy with an unratified treaty.

Use Cases

• Mapping Australia's legal maritime jurisdiction based on the defined territorial sea and baselines.
• Analyzing offshore resource rights and scheduled areas under the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Act 2006.
• Resolving boundary applications by comparing the two supplied versions of the Exclusive Economic Zone.
• Supporting international maritime negotiations with treaty-determined boundary data.

Strengths

• Provides two versions of the Exclusive Economic Zone to clarify legal discrepancies.
• Developed by Geoscience Australia in consultation with key Commonwealth agencies like the Attorney-General's Department.
• Coordinates are supplied in the GDA94 datum, which is functionally equivalent to WGS84.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• The dataset is a non-authoritative copy of the metadata for use in the eAtlas.
• Data reflects the coastline location based on source material available at the time of production in May 2014.

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia, via the Australian Ocean Data Network.

Collection Method

Delineation of domestic and international maritime limits and boundaries under Australian legislation.

Time Range

Currency: May 2014.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-10 12:58:56.131192; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Australia including all external territories.