Overview

The National Geological Maps project compiles national scale information on Australian geology. The datasets are held within Geoscience Australia but draw heavily on collaboration with the State and Northern Territory Geological Surveys. Data coverage extends throughout the Australian jurisdiction, including onshore, in marine zones and in the Australian Antarctic Territory.

Project outputs

1. Surface Geology of Australia

MapConnect online mapping tool
© Geoscience Australia

• The 2010 edition of the 1:1 million scale Surface Geology of Australia is available online through the MapConnect mapping tool and as a data package on DVD. The dataset is a single, seamless national coverage, with the geology edgematched at all map tile and jurisdictional boundaries. It is compiled mainly from 1:250 000 scale mapping.
• Through MapConnect, users can display, query and download user-defined areas of geological and topographic data in various formats, including ESRI geodatabase, shapefile and Mapinfo. It is possible also to make PDF maps of the data.
• The new 2010 dataset joins together the State and Territory based datasets released in 2007 and 2008, corrects errors and omissions identified in the previous data and updates the stratigraphic attribute information to the best available in 2010 from the Australian Stratigraphic Units Database.
• The project also maintains the less detailed 1:2.5 million scale Surface Geology of Australia digital dataset and the Geological Regions of Australia.

2. Scanned 1:250 000 scale geological maps

• Scanned 1:250 000 scale geological maps of Australia are available though the Australian Geoscience Portal, a collaboration of Geoscience Australia and the State and Northern Territory Geological Surveys. This website is being progressively updated as new maps become available.

3. Australian Stratigraphic Units Database

• The Australian Stratigraphic Units Database is the authoritative source of the names, descriptive attributes and source references of all units used in Australia, including their historical usage. The database is maintained for the Australian Stratigraphy Commission. New and improved online tools are provided for users to find information from the Australian Stratigraphic Units Database. Users can search for units by name, age range, State and other attributes. Users can retrieve the entire stratigraphic hierarchy of a unit (ie, both parent and child units), chemical lineage (ie, suites, supersuites) and details of related units as well as map sheets and publications which describe a unit.

Australian geological provinces
coloured by type
© Geoscience Australia

• The Australian Geological Provinces Database online mapping tool provides boundaries and descriptions of rock packages related in space and time through a common geological history. At its simplest, a province may describe a basin and its fill (eg, the Eromanga Basin). However, provinces may also be defined by magmatic genesis or by more complex overprinting processes such as metamorphism, deformation and metallogenesis. Provinces have been compiled at a nominal 1:1 million scale for most of the marine jurisdictional area, but, at this stage, only parts of the onshore continent are covered.
• The Australian Crustal Elements dataset (1998) is available for free download and describes fundamental, large scale elements interpreted largely from geophysical (magnetic and gravity) data. This dataset is currently being revised to take into account recent national gravity and magnetic data compilations and new data sources such as magneto-tellurics, crustal temperature and seismic data.