Current Research within Earth Environment

Six easy lessons in Sponges

While not the most attractive of ocean creatures, sea sponges have both a history and a future in scientific research.

How wombats are getting their teeth into the climate change debate

By pooling the data from wombat teeth and the various other climate indicators of this study, researchers hope to build up a picture of the climate of the Willandra Lakes region spanning back over 100,000 years. Armed with this data, scientists should be able to refine climate models and better understand how to place in context the changes Australia is currently experiencing.

Recent Earth Environment research highlights taken from the 2007 Annual Report

Research Projects

High resolution elemental and isotopic distribution in fossil teeth: Implications for diet and migration - Maxime Aubert

Discovery of Late Pleistocene rock art in Egypt - Maxime Aubert

n situ oxygen isotope analysis of fossil human teeth using a secondary ion micro-probe: a new tool for palaeoecology and archaeology - Maxime Aubert

Speleothems from Flores, Indonesia: tropical archives of climate change - Linda Ayliffe

Holocene mega-droughts and the seasonal structure of El Niño events in the Philippines - Rose Berdin

Direct dating of fossil human remains - Renaud Joannes-Boyau

Speleothem records of palaeomonsoon dynamics from Flores, Indonesia - Sophie Bretherton

Boron in biogenic silica: insights into pH and pCO₂ of the Southern Ocean - Andrea de Leon

Silica banding in the deep-sea lithistid sponge Corallistes undulatus: Investigating the potential influence of diet and environment on growth - Michael Ellwood

Determining Age and Growth Rate of Marine Sponges by Radiocarbon Dating of Carbon trapped in Silica Spicules - Stewart Fallon

The history of aridity in central Australia over the last glacial cycle: Evidence from desert dunefields - Kathryn Fitzsimmons

Coral chemo-geodesy: long-term perspectives for improved prediction of great submarine earthquakes - Michael Gagan

High resolution analysis of uranium and thorium concentration as well as U-series isotope distributions in a Neanderthal tooth from Payre using laser ablation ICP-MS - Rainer Grün

Linkages between coral assemblages and coral-based proxies of terrestrial exposure along a cross-shelf gradient of the Great Barrier Reef - Stacy Jupiter

Strontium isotope tracing in animal teeth at the Neanderthal site of Les Pradelles, Charante, France - Tegan Kelly

Coral Reefs and Global Change - Malcolm McCulloch

Long-term landscape evolution of the Yilgarn Craton, Western Australia - Brad Pillans

Two distinct processes of U-series isotopic diagenesis in a single fossil Porites coral and model correction age - Dingchuang Qu

Uncertainties in seawater thermometry deriving from intra- and inter-test Mg/Ca variability in Globigerinoides ruber - Aleksey Sadekov

Ge-Si ratio in siliceous organisms: A proxy for oceanic circulation? - Jill Sutton

Decoding past rainfall trends from southwest Australian speleothems - Pauline Treble

Deep water upwelling and its implication for the Precambrian Cambrian boundary. Evidences from Molybdenum isotopes in black shales - Martin Wille