SPC Geoscience Division

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Technical Equipment and Services

Sunday, 27 June 2010 14:23 administrator
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Technical Equipment and Services

Technical equipment and services deliver an essential support function both in the field and in the laboratory to marine geoscientific and oceanographic surveys as well as land-based geological, geophysical and hydrological mapping.

Geophysical, oceanographic and geological survey equipment include instrumentation packages; echo-sounders; magnetometer; multi-beam echo-sounders; side-scan processing and data recording equipment; sub-bottom profiler systems; current meters, acoustic Doppler profilers, tide and wave gauges, temperature loggers, conductivity temperature depth profilers, winches and cable counters, seabed sampling tools, drilling equipment, real-time high-end GPS positioning and geodetic survey systems, electrical resistivity and electromagnetic prospecting systems.

The technical equipment and services built up by SOPAC "the Commission" is, and will continue to be, a long-standing facility, highly recognised in the region for its specialised expertise supported by a team of trained and experienced engineers; geological technicians who assist with installation, set up, calibration and data acquisition, providing support for the three technical programmes in their service delivery. It is the intention of SPC, through SOPAC "the Division", to further develop and strengthen this facility.

Last Updated on Thursday, 27 January 2011 09:34  


Newsflash

Data Release Report by Joanne Robbins

Landslides pose a significant threat to life and infrastructure in Papua New Guinea (PNG), with numerous movements being recorded annually. Such events are typically instigated by the combined effects of different geomorphological control factors, such as slope or geology, and the influence of a triggering event (i.e. an earthquake or heavy rainfall). Rugged topography and high seismicity combine in PNG, to make the region highly susceptible to large-volume, earthquake-induced landslides, while the climate encourages widespread rainfall-induced landslides. Of the two triggering mechanisms, understanding rainfall-induced landslide occurrence offers the best scope for early warning/forecasting system development, as meteorological models and data availability improve.

This paper presents an overview of research conducted to understand regionally-based, rainfall-induced landslide occurrence in PNG. Given the regional focus of this research and the need to develop a cost effective and reproducible methodology, pre-existing or freely available satellite and airborne data have been used. The aim of this research was to develop models capable of identifying rainfall events with the potential to trigger landslides, as well as models that distinguish areas of heightened landslide susceptibility from those with low/no landslide susceptibility. Together, these modelling approaches can be used to generate a broad-scale early warning/forecasting system, which could help to reduce the losses associated with landslides across PNG.