Had the curious visitors to Geoscience Australia been scheduled to arrive a little later on Thursday afternoon, the alarm bells and displays of seismographs would have launched into action before their eyes, picking up Earth's rumblings off the north Queensland coast.

Before buildings from Mackay to Townsville were evacuated and the upended lawn chair memes spread, the seismologists in charge of informing the country were wrapping up a week of small tours of the country's earthquake monitoring system in Canberra during National Science Week.

The tours offered interested onlookers the chance to have an intimate look at aspects of Geoscience Australia's operations, ahead of the agency's all-in open day on Sunday.

Duty seismologist Dan Connolly hosted the final earthquake alert centre tour on Thursday, describing the tremor reporting process his colleagues would perform soon after when a 5.8 magnitude tremor near Bowen in north Queensland set off seismometers across the country.

Seismologists at the centre record, analyse and report every tremor in Australia of magnitude 3.5 or greater, and any of magnitude 6 or more around the world.

Following the data from 60 recording stations in Australia and more than 300 across the world, the centre issues advice via its website and social media to news agencies and the public about potential dangers to mainland Australia and offshore territories.

Mr Connolly said the agency, as part of the Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre, had a responsibility to its Indian and Indonesian partners to detect earthquakes that could trigger tsunamis in the Indian Ocean.

Most public interest, however, came from relatively weaker earthquakes in south eastern Australia and other populated centres.

"As far as earthquakes near populated centres go, they tend to be our more impressive ones," Mr Connolly said.

"If an earthquake is big enough to be felt by a human, it's probably going to be a decent earthquake."

While Thursday's 5.8 magnitude earthquake, felt in several Queensland tourist towns, generated headlines and resulted in about 1000 reports from various parts of the state, a quake measuring 6.1 magnitude, or 2.8 times the strength, in a remote part of the Northern Territory did not receive as much attention.

Mr Connolly said the apparent rise in the number of reported earthquakes was due to improved technology, rather than more frequent seismic activity.

He said the use of social media and more reporting stations around Australia were helping to bust the myth that earthquakes rarely happen in the country.

"As Geoscience Australia get more stations up and running, we'll be able to detect more earthquakes, and so naturally we're going to find more, we're going to share more," he said.

"With Twitter, we're able to share this with people a lot quicker. The technology is helping deliver the message in exactly the same way that it increases the speed of anyone talking about it."

The other functions of Geoscience Australia will be on display at the agency's headquarters on Jerrabomberra Avenue in Symonston from 10am to 3pm on Sunday.