Cobar – aeromagnetic pioneer
In early 1963 Australia’s Bureau of Mineral Resources, the BMR. carried out the first airborne proton magnetometer survey in the country, using the instrument designed and largely built by John Newman.
Ways of seeing – the Dayman Dome
The availability of very detailed topographic grids has provided geologists of new ways of looking at areas. Sometimes the results can be spectacular.
Who now remembers MIN?
In December 2021, someone from the South Australia Department of Mines and Energy posted a historical note on LinkedIn., with pictures of survey aircraft VH-BUR. It brought vividly to mind the sight, and odour, of her companion, VH-MIN
Wherein lieth the fault?
A paper published in 2014 shows two possible locations for the Owen Stanley Fault Zone in eastern Papua, one based on gravity, the other on geology. Which is right?
A potato for a geoid
In mid-October 2021 an image of the geoid based on data from NASA’s GRACE satellite was posted on LinkedIn. It was an object lesson in the perils of attempting to disseminate science via a platform that restricts posts to 2500 characters and comments to 1250 characters.
A very smart scientist
One milligal is approximately one millionth of the Earth’s gravity field, so it would seem that the periods of pendulums used for measuring gravity would have to be measured to a few millionths of a second for the results to be useful. This was simply not possible in the early nineteenth century, but pendulums were being used then to obtain results accurate to a few tens of milligal. How was it done?