Project summary
Water resource management is one of the greatest challenges facing sustainable agriculture and urban populations across southern Australia. Key players driving catastrophic droughts in southern Australia are the tropical Indian Ocean Dipole and polar Southern Annual Mode climate systems,...

The program monitors the postglacial rebound which may be occurring near the Lambert Glacier, Prince Charles Mountains, Antarctica since the Last Glacial Maximum. A transect of permanent GPS sites has been established from the coast up to 450 km inland. The aim of the project is to estimate absolute vertical...

Atmospheric dust plumes can affect global climate, but the impact of Australian dust on climate is poorly known even though it is a major dust source. This project will study the magnetism of dust deposits in marine sediments to understand how Australian dust influences climate in order to better predict the...

AusPass is a service dedicated to the acquisition, management, and distribution of passive seismological data in Australia.

Biomarkers
Life in the Precambrian was dominated by bacteria and archaea, organisms that rarely leave diagnostic cellular remains in the fossil record. However, hydrocarbon biomarkers, the molecular fossils of natural products such as lipids and pigments, can yield a wealth of infor­mation about...

Carbon dioxide seep sites expose shallow coral reefs in Papua New Guinea to volcanic CO2 resulting in gradients of seawater ranging from pH 8.0 (normal) to a more acidic pH of 7.5. Some areas of these reefs experience CO2 exposure equivalent to IPCC predictions for 2050 and 2100. In this project we will reconstruct...

The island of Sifnos in the Aegean Sea , Cyclades ( Greece ) is well known for its spectacular and well preserved blueschists and eclogites. The best preserved assemblages occur in structurally high tectonic slices that outcrop in the north of the island.  These slices occur in the upper-plate of a major detachment...

The Aegean Blueschist Belt is one of the most studied extensional zones on Earth. However still there is disagreement as to the complex tectonic history and exhumation of the HP/LT eclogite and blueschist rocks. New and extensive geochronology studies with meso-scale and micro-scale structural analysis of the...

Complex arrays of laterally extensive movement zones occur beneath the Austro-Alpine 'cold lid' of the European Alps. These shear zones operated as extensional movement zones at various times during the tectonic evolution of the Alps, however meso-scale and micro-scale structural analysis show the tectonic history...

Exposure dating is based on the principle that cosmogenic nuclides accumulate in surface rocks as a function of time. After a geological process freshly exposes a rock surface, these cosmogenic nuclides build up at a known rate. Measurement of their present-day abundance, in conjunction with knowledge of the rate...

The accessory mineral allanite occurs in a wide range of igneous and metamorphic rocks and contains appreciable amounts of trace elements including the REEs, Sr, Th and U. The high degree of compositional substitution and variable incorporation of common lead into the allanite crystal structure however has limited...

The project aims to reconstruct deep water carbonate ion and nutrient contents at millennial timescales using high sedimentation cores from the Atlantic Ocean.

Zircon recrystallization, particularly at sub-solidus conditions, can be assisted and enhanced by deformation. Zircon crystals in shear zones and metamorphic rocks that recorded high pressures during subduction are the best material to study the effect of deformation in these robust mineral. Extreme deformation may...

The Southern Ocean is characterised by turbulent flow associated with the world's strongest ocean current, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC). This turbulence is dominated by mesoscale eddies vortices which are small (~50km) compared with the size of the Southern Ocean. Mesoscale eddies play a variety of roles...

The extensive early Archean rock records preserved in southwest Greenland and western Australia carry a wealth of information on the formation of Earth's early chemical domains, the age and composition of the oldest continents and the character of the early atmosphere and hydrosphere.  Although these rocks range...