Magnetotelluric surveys of the AusLAMP Musgraves Province, 2016 to 2018

Brief description

This record was harvested by RDA at 2025-04-25T16:34:41.166+10:00 from NCI's Data Catalogue.

Full description

The central Australian Musgrave Province at the junction of the South, North and West Australian cratons has undergone and continues to retain evidence of significant whole-of-crust, and most likely 'whole-of-lithosphere' tectono-magmatic processes. The area is known for some of the largest geophysical anomalies related to significant Moho offsets of up to 15 km, which resulted from repeated intracratonic reworking since the Neoproterozoic. Magnetotelluric (MT) data were collected across the Musgrave Province in Western Australia and South Australia as part of the Australian Lithospheric Architecture Magnetotelluric Project (AusLAMP). Station spacing was ∼50km between 96 sites over an area of 500 × 700 km. Instruments used to collect the MT time series data were predominantly from the ANSIR/AuScope National MT long-period instrument pool consisting of 6 channel Earth Data Recording Instruments (Model—PR6-24), Bartington 3-component Fluxgate Magnetometers (Model Mag03MS70, 70 nano Tesla, 0–3 kHz) and unpolarisable Pb-PbCl electrodes (Model -PMS9000, SDEC, France). These instruments were deployed for around 3 weeks to ensure data to 10,000 s were recorded. As the survey area was so remote and financial costs to get to the survey area were high, before retrieval of each unit, the data were analysed on site to ensure it was of suitable quality. Data collected throughout the Musgrave Province are generally of very high quality with smooth impedance and tipper responses between 5 s and over 10,000 s. During collection, continuous time series were produced for the individual Ex, Ey, Bx, By and Bz signal, where x referred to the North direction, y referred to East direction and z the vertical direction. Time series were converted to impedances using the BIRRP robust processing code (Chave and Thomson 2004). These time series were inspected to ensure the signal was of sufficiently high quality to meet the objectives of the survey. Various levels of time series data from Earth Data Recording Instruments are presented. Four sites in Western Australia were recorded using LEMI instruments (WA11, WA12, WA28, WASA352) and these have not been processed to higher level time series products. References: Chave, A.D. and Thomson, D.J., 2004. Bounded influence magnetotelluric response function estimation. Geophysical Journal International, 157(3), pp.988-1006. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-246X.2004.02203.x

Credit

The Australian Lithospheric Architecture Magnetotelluric Project (AusLAMP) project is a collaboration between Geoscience Australia, the Geological Surveys of each State and the Northern Territory, AuScope, universities, and other research organisations (https://www.ga.gov.au/about/projects/resources/auslamp).

The Geophysics 2030 project received co-investment from AuScope and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) to support the data curation at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI Australia) (https://doi.org/10.47486/XN002). AuScope, the ARDC and NCI Australia are enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).