Hazards Earthquake
Last updated:18 June 2024
Geoscience Australia’s Community Safety team supports Australia’s ability to manage the impact of earthquakes and helps inform decisions about risk.
We contribute to each stage of the emergency management cycle to help improve preparedness, response and recovery with our focus on contributing towards community safety.
Our role
We operate the National Earthquake Alerts Centre to provide around the clock monitoring, analysis and alerting of significant earthquakes to the emergency management sector. To help understand what could be at threat from earthquakes, we provide exposure information about buildings, demographics, community infrastructure and agricultural commodities.
Our nation-wide seismic hazard assessment defines the level of earthquake ground shaking across Australia that has a specified likelihood of being exceeded across a given time period.
This information is used by building standards and decision makers to develop mitigation strategies so that communities can be more resilient to earthquake events.
We also use this information to provide advice to government on seismic hazards that may impact infrastructure projects for a low-carbon economy.
We also provide around the clock access to data about people, property and infrastructure potentially exposed. Our information aids in providing an understanding of the situation to targeted preparedness, response and recovery efforts.
Our products, tools and data provide a better understanding of hazard vulnerabilities for all sectors to plan, prepare and reduce exposure to natural hazards improving preparedness now and into the future.
Emerging capabilities
We engage with different sectors to provide assessments and address new challenges as they emerge.
- Our Researchers are committed to growing our knowledge base to prepare for challenges of the future.
- We continue to improve knowledge on potentially active faults across Australia and are developing a database of earthquake ground-motion data for engineering applications
- We have a strong attendance at conferences and events to maintain awareness of the challenges faced by the community safety sector and keep up to date with latest science.
- Our open-source data is accessed by developers interested in solving operational challenges of reducing vulnerability and exposure to natural hazards.
Top products
Retrofitting buildings to withstand earthquakes and severe wind
A series of booklets that guide building owners, builders, architects and local government in retrofitting unreinforced masonry buildings to resist earthquake damage and severe wind.
National Earthquake Alerts Centre (NEAC)
NEAC is the only earthquake monitoring and alerting service in Australia that is operational 24 hours a day.
Australian Neotectonic Features Database (NFD)
Visit our inventory of over 370 Australian intraplate faults, fault-related folds and other features relating to earthquakes large enough to deform the Earth’s surface.
National Seismic Hazard Assessment (NSHA)
The NSHA defines the level of earthquake ground shaking across Australia, allowing higher hazard areas to be identified and mitigation strategies to be developed.
Earthquake Scenario Selector Tool
Query, visualise and download earthquake scenarios using pre-generated scenarios that represent plausible events that can be used for earthquake risk management and planning.
Australian Seismic Site Conditions Map (ASSCM)
Determine the potential behaviour of geological materials under the influence of seismic ground shaking at a site of interest.
Case study Assessing the resilience of ageing buildings against earthquake hazards
How our collaborations and science improved the safety of communities in York, Western Australia.
The result will not only be useful for York, they will enable the refinement and adaption of the retrofit information for wider application to similar buildings elsewhere in the State and nation.
York Shire President