OFFSHORE PROJECTS
Marine coring projects undertaken by GeoCoastal offshore include pre-dredge sediment assessments for port and marina expansions, trestle locations, resource investigations, ocean disposal surveys and pipeline/cable route assessments.
Seabed materials cored range from very soft silt/fluid sands to stiff/very stiff/hard clays, suitable for geotechnical analyses. Using vessels and mobile barges with rapid deployment techniques projects have usually been completed with liitle or no standby in conditions ranging to 20 knots.
PROJECTS
RESOURCE PROJECTS
GeoCoastal undertakes continuous coring for both on and offshore resource investigation projects, predominantly sand and/or gravel and potentially recoverable mine tailings.
Our custom designed barges are road transportable and easily configurable for sites varying from dredge ponds and tailings dams to Moreton Bay, Tasmania and Torres Strait. On land our specialist light rigs have superior accessibility to terrain that is largely untrafficable by heavier rigs and the capability to retrieve continuous core greater than the standard 6m, routinely to lengths of >20 metres.
ONSHORE PROJECTS
Vibracoring is well suited to obtaining continuous sample for environmental testing as well as resource assessments in coastal environments.
GeoCoastal has a range of specialist All Terrain Vehicles fitted with varying coring systems that have handled materials ('soft soils") from estuarine muds to flowing sands and indurated ('coffee rock") layers in many coastal regions in eastern and southern Australia for major engineering projects such as highway bypasses, and government soil mapping projects.
CORAL REEF PROJECTS
GeoCoastal's Prof Trevor Graham has designed new coring equipment to enable low-impact deep coring of coral reefs. Projects undertaken with the University of Queensland, QUT and Sydney Uni in 2014 and 2015 at Heron Island and One Tree Island have produced continuous coral cores of unprecedented length (to 30m) and density that have allowed numerous state-of-the-art research studies to be carried out.
The results of the multi-disciplinaryresearch are providing fundamental changes to the understanding of coral reef evolution and paleoclimatic conditions within the Capricorn Group and wider regions of the Great Barrier Reef. The coring program itself came to the attention of Sir David Attenborough’s filming of "Great Barrier Reef " at Heron Island (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKlNGtG7VE4&list=PLrPCCOilfKQFYRbGGmGnu82CREchiZSyC&index=8).
