The continental land mass of East Antarctica is one of the least understood regions on Earth. This is due to the ice cover, several km thick in places, and the rock outcrops being restricted to the coastal regions. It is also a region that is very limited in the available geophysics coverage (e.g. seismic tomography, airborne magnetics and gravity) but initiatives of the International Polar Year of 2007/08, and subsequent data compilations, have resulted in significant improvements. A number of continent-wide data sets were recently made available to the international community.

This project seeks to combine geological and geophysical data, including the use of statistical and probabilistic methods, to progress our understanding of the East Antarctic Lithosphere. A highlight of 2019 was the publication of a paper, by CODES/IMAS PhD student Tobias Staal and the project team, that used a multivariate method to constrain major boundaries in the deep lithosphere. Further achievements include the development and publication of open source software for joint geological and geophysical data analysis, and progress in areas of solid-Earth geophysics that link to interdisciplinary studies of the great ice sheets and outlet glaciers.