No abstract

Coal seam gas mining in the Surat and Bowen Basins in Queensland, Australia, has developed rapidly over the past decade. Many landholders are concerned about the effects of the i ndustry on groundwater and agricultural resources and the weakness of official oversight, recently criticised by the Queensland Audit Office. Gas and water extraction is now extending under some of the most productive agricultural lands in Australia, the Darling Downs. Uncertainties remain as to the impacts of gas activities on aquifers. The water extracted along with the gas is often salty, and the method of disposing of the salts is a contentious, unresolved issue. The power imbalance between industry and landholders and weak regulation of industry hinders efforts by the in dustry to obtain a social licence. Governments have, to a large extent, neglected the region-wide and long-term effects of the mining. Extracting gas and water from the coal seams leaves depressurised zones, which lead to subsidence of the earth layers above the seam and leakage of aquifers into the coal seams with deleterious consequences for agricultural production. The statutory 'make good' process for compensating for loss of the aquifer water does not adequately offset the negative effects on the hydrological resources and on agricultural production. The prevailing self-regulation, lack of baseline assessment and inadequate monitoring of the mining processes are abrogations of government responsibility and the precautionary principle. As the industry is still ramping up, there is precious little time to protect agricultural land and the natural systems that underpin agriculture from potentially irrevocable damage.

Australia's historical scientific archives are open for investigation by citizen scientists, such as myself. They hold our unique primary scientific records, data and references, and they are found in universities, museums, state libraries and government agencies, national archives and on researchers' PCs. While our paper archives have recently been exposed to digitisation, modern digital scientific information is not being upgraded and collated into our modern digital knowledge-management 'data mining' global computational systems. I am writing this awareness article, flavoured with 40 years of seismological engagement and as a purposeful contribution in support of World Digital Preservation Day (22 November 2020), 'At Risk Digital Materials'. This paper establishes that Queensland has an incomplete 'public' history of local tsunami hazard occurrence. Further, it announces the discovery of a new meteotsunami meteorological hazard occurrence on 3 June 1917. By retrieving the various types of archived data, this paper questions and reflects on our society's lack of tsunami hazard preparedness, highlighting an obvious decline in scientific rigour in communicating such knowledge about our environment. This discussion of meteotsunamis illustrates the multivariate complexity of weather systems, with climate-change-related phenomena capable of creating coastal tsunami-like hazards commonly causally linked to undersea earthquakes and/or landslip or tectonic fault movement.

area on the central New South Wales coast experienced the effects of an earthquake. This event, recorded by several seismograph stations in eastern Australia, was located about 25 km north-northeast of Kempsey (30.87OS, 152.980E). Its magnitude was Mr 3.3 (Cooney Observatory) The earthquake was felt over an area of about reported from Eungai Rail -South West Rocks -Macksville .

Seismologists listen to Earth’s noise as it rips apart (faulting), exudes (volcanoes) and swallows (subducts) large volumes of rock. Your mobile phone is most likely detecting such noise, right now! This paper is about one such specific noise, the T wave. It summarises an early and successful piece of citizen science, performed within The University of Queensland Seismograph Stations (UQSS) observatory, in cooperation with colleagues at CSIRO. It was designed to encourage young STEM students from Brisbane high schools to engage in “real” research, back in 1995. Bear in mind, this is a time period when science is changing considerably from analog to digital media and operational recording methods. The citizen science students used a pre-prepared decadal collection (1980–1990) of T waves, derived from the Brisbane seismograph (BRS) observatory data catalogue. BRS has been operating since 1937 and is part of the global World-Wide Seismograph Station Network (WWSSN). Fortunately, seismology is a very collaborative field. There is a lot of data analysis involved in the science of recording earthquake signals, with auxiliary definitive catalogues, observers logbooks, housing of the recordings themselves (analog and digital) and the software mediums that change over time. It equally tests housekeeping proficiency, where a maze of record-keeping problems can be encountered in a longitudinal data collection study such as this. Having completed the project report, Earthquake generated T phases on BRS Seismograph (Brisbane, Q’ld) a predictor for Tasman Sea Tsunamis? their (analog) results sat in a cupboard until recently. The project was re-analysed in 2022 for a higher-degree student, discovering a timely climate change implication for the study. The original research question has now been amplified with a brief literature review. We observe that currently in Australia, university and government earth science observatories have diminished, and in their place, public seismic networks (PSN) have evolved, either in backyard sheds or school science labs. We now additionally propose here that the level of expertise required ideally fits the role of advancing citizen science, for a real science advantage. This is already a topical citizen disaster preparedness action area, and we propose that it has applications as a possible educational strategy for citizen engagement in today’s climate emergency. In addition, we are hopeful that other researchers in oceanography will read this paper and decide to explore the ocean’s temperature rise phenomenon through the eyes of seismological observers.