SEES Seminars 2012

30/11/2012
3:00pm
41.157

Conferences warm-up (AAA, ANZGG, AGU) - "Shaping the Earth's Surface" discussion group

Here’s the current program:
Ashley Martin - Reconstructing Past Variations of the Indo-Australian Monsoon in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Australia

Paolo Abballe - The origin of organic matter in surface sediments of the Shoalhaven river-estuary-continental shelf system from lipid biomarker and δ13C and Δ14C analysis of total organic carbon

Anthony Dosseto - Climatic control on erosion in the Himalayas over the past 40 ka

Chulantha Jayawardena - Nature of displacement along neotectonic faults in Mount Lofty and Flinders ranges, South Australia

John Jansen - Erosion in Cold Landscapes

There’s a few conferences coming up (AAA, ANZGG, AGU,...) and we would like to organise some sort of rehearsal session on Friday 30th November afternoon. This will also be the opportunity to keep each other up to date with what we’re currently working on.

16/11/2012
4:30pm
41.153

"Shaping the Earth's Surface" group discussion

Dr. Susan Hayes will animate a discussion on facial approximation and its application to Archaeological Sciences and many other fields. Her presentation is entitled:

Putting a Face to a Skull: Evidence Based Facial Approximation

Bio:
Dr Susan Hayes is a facial anthropologist undertaking research with the Centre for Archaeological Science. Her specialisation is facial approximation, or the likely facial appearace of the deceased based on verified relations between the skull and its soft tissues. Working primarily with archaeological remains, Susan's research publications have included the Lapita People, an individual from the Huarpe tribe in South America, the first Maori settlers to arrive in New Zealand, and she has just completed an evidence-based approximation of 'the Hobbit' (Homo floresiensis) which will be presented to the Australian Archaeological Association in early December. Susan's work is necessarily multidisciplinary, spanning craniofacial anatomy, biological anthropology, portraiture, face perception and forensic science, as well as archaeology. This interactive presentation will cover her current methods and associated research issues.

9/11/2012
4:30pm
41.153

"Shaping the Earth's Surface" group discussion

Dr. Jody Webster (Sydney Uni) will animate a discussion on the evolution of the Great Barrier Reef since the Last Glacial Maximum, with a presentation entitled:

Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Expedition 325 to the Great Barrier Reef: unlocking the history of reef growth and demise since the Last Glacial Maximum

Food and refreshments will be available to stimulate the discussion (gold coin donation for drinks). See you on Friday in 41.153 at 4:30PM.

SPECIAL NOTE: We’ll be taking Jody to dinner after the seminar, and students will eat for cheap, thanks to sponsorship from the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society! The dinner will be at 7pm, Mango Tree Cafe & Restaurant, Cliff Rd, North Wollongong. RSVP to Helen McGregor (mcgregor@uow.edu.au).

And if you would like to meet with Jody on Friday afternoon please also drop an email to Helen.

Abstract:

“Predicting how the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) will respond to future global climate changes and over what time frame is crucial. Fossil reefs record critical data on the geomorphic and ecological consequences of both long-term and abrupt centennial-millennial scale environmental changes. The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Expedition 325 investigated a succession of submerged fossil reefs on the shelf edge of the GBR to establish the course of sea-level change, define sea-surface temperature variations but also analyse the impact of these environmental changes on reef growth since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Thirty-four boreholes were cored from 17 sites along four transects at three locations (Hydrographers Passage, Noggin Pass and Ribbon Reef) in water depths between 42 to 167 m. These cores record responses of the GBR to past environmental stresses similar to current scenarios of future climate change (i.e. changing sea-levels, SST’s, water quality). Lithologic, biologic and chronologic data document a dynamic coral reef system that grew, drowned and backstepped repeatedly up-slope as sea level rose since the LGM. In this seminar I will present an overview of the main Expedition 325 results, including a synthesis of the main dating and reef response team’s initial findings, in the context of the available site survey data (bathymetry, seismic, seabed imagery). Finally, I will touch on the broader implications of these data for understanding how the geometry, composition and development of the GBR responded to repeated and major environmental disturbances over the last 30 ka.”

17/10/2012
12:30pm
30.G06

AUSCCER Seminar Series

Discourses of automobility

Theresa Harada, PhD Candidate, Ausccer, University of Wollongong

In an era of increased recognition of the anthropogenic contribution to climate change, debates around sustainability have highlighted the need to engage more critically with the normative assumptions of everyday practice. The Australian Government has approached the problem of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from car driving by positioning the choice to drive as an ethical one. Federal educational campaigns position drivers as rational and agentitive decision makers; if drivers understood the environmental impact of driving then they would opt for low carbon alternative modes of transport. However changing everyday driving habits is hindered by the dominant discourses that surround automobility. The discourses of automobility position car driving as fast, convenient and private and an indispensible mainstay of contemporary life. In contrast the discourses of sustainability position car driving as polluting, unsustainable and avoidable. As a result the meanings of car driving are increasingly conflicting and contested. Using empirical data collected in Wollongong over the period from 2010-2011 I illustrate through discourse and narrative analysis how the ethical dilemma of transport choices is negotiated and how particular driving behaviours become normalised. The unreflective nature of driving, the view of the car as a solution, rather than the cause of the fragmented nature of time/space, and the inevitability and desirability of a future of automobility were themes that emerged.

12/10/2012
4:30pm
41.153

“Shaping the Earth’s surface” group discussion

Dr. Chris Fogwill (UNSW) will animate a discussion on Antarctic ice sheet evolution during the Holocene, with a presentation entitled:

ABRUPT HOLOCENE SHIFTS IN ANTARCTIC ICE STREAM DIRECTION

Abstract:

Determining past ice stream behaviour is critical for understanding and predicting likely dynamic responses of ice sheets to future climate change. Here we present new terrestrial (in situ ¹⁴C and ¹⁰Be) and marine geological constraints (¹⁴C) that allow us to reconstruct past surface profile changes in the Rutford and Institute ice streams entering the Weddell Sea embayment (WSE). Our data reveal that although these two adjacent ice streams exhibited similar surface elevations at the height of the Last Glacial Maximum, the pattern of ice surface lowering contrasted markedly during the Last Termination, showing asynchronous thinning trajectories as they approached present-day configurations during the mid-Holocene.  To understand the mechanism for these different trends, we use a high-resolution ice-sheet model, forced with a warming ocean and rising sea-levels, to simulate grounding-line retreat in the WSE. We discover that the decoupling of surface trajectories of the two ice streams was most likely driven by differences in the rate of grounding line retreat across the WSE, resulting in the Institute Ice Stream switching direction by 90˚ and discharging ice into the Thiel Trough, rather than the Rutford Depression as it does at present. These findings highlight that spatial variability in ice flow can trigger marked changes in the pattern, flux and direction of extensive ice steams on centennial to millennial timescales, decoupling them from direct climate forcing. Understanding and modeling these abrupt diversions is critical for predicting West Antarctic Ice Sheet stability under projected regional ocean warming scenarios.

3/10/2012
12:30pm
30.G06

AUSCCER Seminar Series

The seminar will be presented by Peter Hobbins from Sydney University. All welcome.

Venom, vermin and vivisection: snakes and the animal matrix in colonial Australia Seminar by Peter Hobbins, PhD candidate, Department of History, University of Sydney Wednesday 3 October 12:30-1:30pm. Woolyungah Indigenous Centre 30.G06.

Wherever settlers came ashore across the antipodean colonies, they were never alone. Disembarking alongside them, down gangplanks and anchor chains, were their domestic familiars: horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, dogs, fowls, rats and mice. Scarcity, commerce and sentiment soon came to codify both hierarchies and equivalences between these beasts. Since this legal, moral and economic animal matrix also took account of novel species – whether acclimatised or autochthonous – placement in this framework was rarely static. Except, perhaps, in the case of snakes. Neither natural history nor folkbiology could find meaning or value in venomous serpents, even as disdainful attitudes towards indigenous fauna softened toward the end of the nineteenth century. Unlike dogs or rabbits, emus or hawks, snakes remained ‘vermin’ in the face of shifting game laws and animal protection acts. Moreover, fear of their venom drove a widespread yet largely unremarked culture of vivisection across the colonies, with snakebite experiments conducted by lay, scientific and medical practitioners alike. In explicating the moralities and epistemologies underpinning this practice, my paper explores the conflicting ways in which settlers ‘knew’ animals in colonial Australia.

21/9/2012
4:30pm
41.153

“Shaping the Earth’s surface” group discussion

Prof Lesley Head will be stirring discussion with a presentation entitled:

Will the future be like the past? Analogues, complexity & uncertainty in the Anthropocene

Abstract:

Many a good Quaternary grant application has snuck over the line by talking in the national significance section about ‘learning lessons from the past’. But - whether that talk is of extinctions, CO₂ levels, drought and flood, or hunter-gatherer tolerance of risk – just how relevant is such knowledge to the challenges ahead of us?

Regardless of whether the Anthropocene survives to formal definition by the International Commission on Stratigraphy as a geological epoch, it has entered public debate to denote a stage of human history where stability can not be assumed. New forms of human-environment partnership are identifiable in the literature; for example anthropogenic biomes and novel ecosystems. Others will need to be developed, especially if the conditions that have supported agriculture throughout the Holocene no longer pertain.

The last few decades have seen the rise of non-linear dynamics in a range of scientific disciplines – ecology, hydrology, climate modeling, to name a few that geographers are connected with. But the findings of complexity theory, and the arguments for specifiable uncertainty, are still in contest with a reductionist and determinist view that science is predictive. This is a tension, and arguably a burden, for the IPCC and the climate change debate more broadly, which have been forced into a framing about the settledness of science.

I aim to start a genuine discussion by presenting a short provocation and then opening it up to the floor. Leave behind your grant-speak, bring along your research examples and be prepared to discuss them.

7/9/2012
4:30pm
41.153

“Shaping the Earth’s surface” group discussion

Friday 07 September 2012 - Topic: Quaternary science and OSL dating

The discussion will be animated by Luke Gliganic with a presentation entitled: Shedding light on the Quaternary using OSL: background, problems, and case studies

When? Friday 4:30PM Where? Building 41, room 153.

5/9/2012
12:30pm
41.153

GeoQuEST Seminar

Greenland 2012 fieldwork: Oldest carbon sequestration and weathering

Allen Nutman, SEES and Vickie Bennett, Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University

Under the auspices of our 2012-2014 ARC Discovery project “Carbon dioxide sequestration more than 3.7 billion years ago and the oldest climate cycles”, in July fieldwork was undertaken in Greenland. The seminar will take a pictorial tour through the fieldwork – its setting, life in the field, the rocks, and the questions we will answer.

Geological fieldwork in Greenland takes place in a narrow window between annual snow cover melting mid-June and new snow cover arriving in September. Our time in the field of 3 weeks in July was blessed with extraordinary good weather, with only one day lost. The work focussed on the Isua area – a pleasant undulating 700-1000 m high plateau at the edge of the ice cap, ~150 km from the capital of Greenland – Nuuk. Thus the logistics are ‘easy’ as long as one has the money for helicopter transport! Two camps were on the Isua supracrustal belt, which at ~35 km long and up to 1 km wide is the world’s largest package (a 3700+3800 Ma tectonic assemblage) of extremely old meta- volcanic and sedimentary rocks. In addition we had a camp on a smaller area of ~3900 Ma meta- volcanic and sedimentary rocks that we discovered via reconnaissance fieldwork and U-Pb zircon dating. As the world’s oldest volcanic and sedimentary rocks, these are a unique resource for understanding solid-earth-atmosphere-hydrosphere-(biosphere?) interactions at the start of the geological record. For confidentiality until publishing, we refer to this as ‘locality X’.

A particularly important revelation occurs in ~3700 Isua carbonates, where a single low strain zone preserves meta- dolomite+quartz rocks without reaction to form tremolite, i.e., indicating preservation of a high X_CO2 fluid phase during metamorphism with a maximum possible temperature of only ~550°C (at ~5 Kbar). They show original hummocky structures reminiscent of stromatolites. Such rocks indicate drawdown of CO₂ from the atmosphere – most likely by biomediation. This is the best-preserved part of a more deformed and altered carbonate facies, which overlies a weathered surface of slightly older (3709 Ma) arc-related meta-basalts and andesites. In turn the carbonate facies is overlain by a sequence of slightly younger (3695 Ma) clean, magnetite-bearing, banded iron formations and cherts. Thus we are able to reconstruct a transgression over a foundering assemblage of subareally-weathered arc rocks – which at ~3700 Ma is the oldest facies reconstruction. The chemistry (including Sr, Fe, Mg, O isotopes) of the weathering profile and the carbonate rocks will provide important constraints on atmospheric composition, surface temperatures and biomediation (i.e., oldest evidence for life) and even the volume of Hadean (pre-4000 Ma) continental crust.

In the locality ‘X’ ~3900 Ma assemblage we have discovered similar rocks. However, the record has been compromised by higher degrees of metamorphism and overall higher strain. None the less, the assemblage still contains recognisable cherty-dolomite sedimentary rocks, now preserved as calcite+olivine marbles. By judicious sampling, these can still be used to constrain Earth’s surficial processes, at the dawn of the volcanic and sedimentary record.