ZR (2009-2011): Mount Isa Northern Queensland

• Australian National University (ANU), Australia

The MINQ experiment was conducted by the Australian National University and the Geological Survey of Queensland as part of the AuScope Infrastructure program, and involved setting up an array of portable earthquake recorders on a rectangular grid with approximately 50km spacing, beginning in the Mount Isa area. Instruments are ANU solid state recorders and Lennartz 3Dlite-MII seismometers.

The instruments recorded seismic waves passing through the Earth from distant earthquakes in the Pacific, Indian and Southern Oceans. By comparing the signals and their arrival times at different sites it is possible to learn about the geological history of North Queensland from structures we can see deep in the crust. We can resolve these seismic velocity changes in this way down as far as 50 to 100km depth. The images are constructed from the travel times of seismic waves using ray tracing and seismic tomography.

An initial 21 instruments were installed in the Mount Isa area in June 2009 as the first phase of a deployment that moved progressively to the east over several years. The network was expanded to 25 instruments when the first data was collected on an instrument service run in September. Most of the instruments were moved in late 2010 to the second phase of the experiment, MINQ-B, is installed on the plains east of Cloncurry.

FDSN Web Services provide a common data access API for seismic data.

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