How can you image the Earth from the surface to hundreds of kilometres below, revealing the full profile of the Australian continent and the solid upper mantle below? In this project, geoscientists have used magnetotelluric and seismic imaging techniques that both draw on natural phenomena like the sun, lightning and waves crashing on the edge of the continent.
“That single instrument there will have some sensitivity to the Earth over scale lengths of a metre down to 200 kilometres. Which is crazy when you think about how far 200 km is away.”
— Professor Graham Heinson (GH)
The magnetometers used in this project were purchased from Ukraine. The University of Adelaide is supporting a GoFundMe campaign to support them during the Russia-Ukraine war.
“We’re measuring natural signals - small earthquakes - from around the world [including] things like the ocean swell hammering on coastlines of Australia.
These signals travel across the continent and these seismometers measure these tiny variations of amplitude and change of the position. From this, we can determine something of the seismic structure of the Curnamona Province.”
— GH
