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The Geology of a Large Submerged Continental Block: the Kenn Plateau Off Northeast Australia

Created 17/10/2025

Updated 17/10/2025

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In general, we met the scientific objective of this voyage in improving our understanding of the geological evolution and modern environmental setting of the poorly known Kenn Plateau off northeast Australia. The voyage was an overall success, but the sampling program was greatly curtailed for two reasons: problems with the Geoscience Australia seismic compressor increased the amount of seismic time needed, and the ship's winches failed with 4 sampling days to go. As Chief Scientist for the Mellish Rise voyage scheduled for November-December 2004, I gratefully accepted the offer of an additional two days' ship time to allow some key Kenn Plateau dredges to be taken. This will enable us to meet all our pre-voyage objectives, albeit late. The RV Southern Surveyor's acquisition program can be summarised as: 1 Successful seismic program with 3090 km of high-quality seismic data collected. 2 Successful swath-mapping program with 7584 km of bathymetric data using the SIMRAD EM 300 multibeam sonar system. 3 Only 12 dredge hauls and one grab were obtained. The seismic results will enable us to greatly improve our geological understanding of this very poorly known part of Australia's marine jurisdiction. The swath mapping results will improve existing bathymetric maps and also our understanding of sedimentary processes on the plateau margins. The sampling results will allow us to start to build up a reliable geological history of this region. This survey recovered the first ancient rocks from this large frontier offshore region. The performance of the vessel and equipment was generally good. The entire ship's crew performed very well, being professional, helpful and courteous. The CSIRO support technicians did everything that could be expected of them. Steve Thomas was an excellent voyage manager, always looking for and finding ways to help the Geoscience Australia science contingent in their work.

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Additional Info

Field Value
Title The Geology of a Large Submerged Continental Block: the Kenn Plateau Off Northeast Australia
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/11a2f9c0-3b4f-4634-93b3-5af5624e9f71
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period 20/04/2018
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
{
  "coordinates": [
    [
      [
        166.0,
        -22.0
      ],
      [
        171.0,
        -22.0
      ],
      [
        171.0,
        -18.0
      ],
      [
        166.0,
        -18.0
      ],
      [
        166.0,
        -22.0
      ]
    ]
  ],
  "type": "Polygon"
}
Data Portal Geoscience Australia

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Geoscience Australia "The Geology of a Large Submerged Continental Block: the Kenn Plateau Off Northeast Australia". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/the-geology-of-a-large-submerged-continental-block-the-kenn-plateau-off-northeast-australia1