Research projects

This research program uses laboratory experiments and geophysical imaging techniques to constrain the thickness and density structure of continental crust and investigate its relationship to mineral systems.

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...

Utilize elemental, isotopic and radiometric proxies trapped in deep sea coral skeletons to examine past climate.

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...

Developing ultra-green hydrogen technologies

Congested subduction happens whenever buoyant material such as an oceanic plateau gets caught up on a moving plate and eventually arrives at a subduction zone. The buoyant material may be scraped off or subducted, but it always puts up a fight which leaves characteristic scars on the over-riding plate.

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...

The objective of this ARC Linkage project with Geoscience Australia and GSWA is to provide a compilation of 3-D models of the crustal and lithospheric structure from new broadband data obtained with deployment of 25 seismometers in Southwest WA.

This research is part of an ARC Linkage project. Read more about it in this news story.
 

Radioactivity generates heat within the mantle, while mantle convection removes heat.  Because the radioactivity slowly decays, the temperature within the mantle declines and mantle convection becomes less vigorous.  Thus geological activity should also slow down.  However during the first 1-2 billion years of...

Experimental petrology is about subjecting rocks and minerals to pressure, temperature and other conditions that occur in the Earth, in order to investigate and understand processes that lead to diverse processes including volcanism, plate tectonics, ore deposit formation, differentiation of the Earth and many others.

The base of the Lake George fault scarp defines the edge of the basin and previous surveys suggested the Quaternary fault zone extends at depth. A dense seismic array of 100 nodal seismometers were deployed in late 2020 in the northern section of the basin and collected continuous seismic recordings for ~1 month

Convection in the Earth's mantle is driven by the sinking of cold lithospheric plates at subduction zones and by the rise of hot plumes from the core-mantle boundary.
As the plumes rise, they are deflected horizontally by the large-scale flow driven by the sinking plates. In the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics...