Report to the National Oceans Office on the production of a consistent, high-quality bathymetric data grid and definition and description of geomorphic units for part of Australia’s marine jurisdiction. Peter Harris, Andrew Heap, Vicki Passlow, Laura Sbaffi, Melissa Fellows, Rick Porter-Smith, Cameron Buchanan and James Daniell. Commonwealth of Australia, 2005. ISBN 0 642 46791 9.

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• Geomorphic features of the continental margin of Australia (PDF - 9.1 MB)

About the report

In July 2002, Geoscience Australia and the National Oceans Office agreed to carry out a jointly-funded project to produce a consistent, high-quality bathymetric data grid from the coastline of Australia out to the 200 nautical mile limit (i.e., covering the coastal waters, the territorial sea, and the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) - by far the largest of the jurisdictions), and to use the grid to identify and map geomorphic features of the seabed.

The area selected to be mapped covered the contiguous portion of continental Australia’s 200 nautical mile zone, as well as the same zone around Macquarie Island (part of Tasmania), and the Australian Territories of Norfolk Island, Christmas Island, and Cocos-Keeling Islands.

Australia’s marine jurisdiction off Heard and McDonald Islands and the Australian Antarctic Territory was not included in the present project.

The methods section of this report provides a list of data used and the computational procedures employed to reduce the data to a 250 m resolution bathymetric grid.

The techniques and definitions used to produce the geomorphic feature map are also described.

In the results section of the report, the key geomorphic features of the Australian continental margin are described, drawing extensively on work published in the scientific literature.

Specific geomorphic features that have been named or that have been reported in scientific investigations are reviewed and the overall geomorphic make-up of the margin is summarised in the form of a geographic information system (GIS).