GEMOC ARC National Key Centre

Director's preface

THIS REPORT summarises GEMOC’s 2004 activities including research, technology development, strategic applications and industry interaction, international links and teaching (at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels). The report is required as part of GEMOC’s formal annual accounting to the Australian Research Council (ARC). The ARC acknowledges GEMOC as a continuing ARC National Key Centre while GEMOC attracts sufficient income to fund its activities and achieve its annual goals, and submits an Annual Report fulfilling ARC reporting requirements.

Last year we experimented with new ways of presenting the Report and we sent, with all our posted copies, a questionnaire inviting your feedback on your preferences for delivery of our report, with choices including web access only, CD, traditional hard copy, hard copy of Research Highlights, and with composite combinations. The overwhelming response was to keep the hard copy distribution and post a web copy as well. This was also our preference, but the increasing costs of hard copy production (a large proportion of a postdoctoral salary) have made it prudent to go fully electronic. We have prepared the 2004 Report as a CD which we can mail to you, and it is posted on our website (www.es.mq.edu.au/GEMOC/) both in downloadable pdf format and as an html version.

GEMOC’s funding continued to access a wide portfolio of income sources ranging from traditional research sources such as the Australian Research Council schemes, non-ARC government sources, delivery of value-added consulting to the mineral exploration industry, industry collaborative projects (both mineral exploration and technology development industries), strategic alliances with technology and instrument manufacturers, commercialisation ventures (such as marketing of GLITTER software with New Wave Research), and international links and alliances that provide reciprocal resources. The latter included significant funding from the Johnson Space Centre, NASA and the Carnegie Institution through the AMASE (Arctic Mars Analogue Svalbard Expedition) Project in the Centre for Physics of Geological Processes at the University of Oslo. Four GEMOC researchers participated in the AMASE program in Spitsbergen in September 2004 (see Research Highlights and front cover).

The suite of new instrument rooms and clean geochemical laboratories for GEMOC is now fully operational and provides a world-class facility that, along with the extensive instrument array (see the text and photos in the section on Technology development), attracts many national and international researchers. A successful LIEF bid resulted in the purchase of a Triton Thermal Ionisation Mass Spectrometer to complement the capabilities of the Nu Multi-collector Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometers. GEMOC’s strategy of driving basic research with parallel strategic and applied goals, requires our high-technology facilities to deliver the relevant developments in technology and analytical methodologies.

GEMOC has achieved tremendous advances in understanding the nature of Earth’s lithosphere and its processes and we now plan to plunge deeper and explore the whole mantle and core-mantle interaction with the same interdisciplinary approach, integrating geochemical, geophysical and tectonic information. This new direction will align with the planned experimental studies of deep Earth processes which will be a part of the research program of Professor Bernard Wood, the second Federation Fellow to join GEMOC, who will arrive mid 2005.

Throughout 2004, Macquarie University continued to provide a supportive research framework for GEMOC to operate within.

We look forward to expanding beyond the lithosphere to explore Earth’s deeper regions through 2005.

Suzanne Y. O'Reilly

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