AusPASS - Transitions in the Banda Arc-Australia continental collision (Banda Arc)

AusPass is a service dedicated to the acquisition, management, and distribution of passive seismological data in Australia. Extensive fieldwork projects are conducted across the country, organized in seismic arrays (i.e. groups of seismic stations).Eastern Indonesia is one of the least well understood geological domains of our planet, and yet the region provides a truly remarkable natural experiment for unraveling the complex dynamics of convergent tectonics. The recent, subduction-related collision of the Australian continental lithosphere with the active Banda arc effectively captures the initiation of convergence orogenesis and offers a rare glimpse into a process that has shaped Earth’s evolution over geologic time, as well as providing fresh insights into seismic hazards confronting the world’s fourth most populous country. A number of mysteries remain about the transition from subduction to arc-continental collision in the Banda arc, reflecting fundamental gaps in the general understanding of collisional tectonics.