Institute for Environmental Research

News and events

September 2009

  • Dr David Fink and Prof Keith Fifield (ANU) have published an invited book chapter in Volume 5 of the Encyclopedia of Mass Spectrometry (Elsevier Press, 2009). The chapter titled Accelerator Mass Spectrometry in Environmental Studies is a comprephensive  review of the impact Accelerator Mass Spectrometry has made in various fields of earth sciences.

  • David Fink and Quan Hua have published a paper culminating from 4 years of endeavour in the prestigious journal, Quaternary Science Reviews. At ANSTO the radiocarbon concentration in tree-rings from rate logs of Huon Pine were measured from 12,000-13,000 yer old logs from Tasmania, a time when Europe plunged back into a glacial climate whilst Australia was warming after the last glacial maximum. They compared the Huon record with northern hemisphere ocean sediments to explain how changes in the earth's ocean circulation may explain the hemispheric asymmetry in climate change.

    • August 2009

  • John Dodson, Cath Hughes, Andrew Smith contributed lectures to senior science high school students as part of National Science Week. These were delivered live into some schools and the talks remain on-line for other schools to access. Topics included nuclear methods in environmental science, atoms for measuring climate change, and isotopes for understanding water sustainabillity.

  • In collaboration with the Federal Police the Accelerator Science Project is investigating how radiation from different sources can degrade forensic evidence and what steps have to be taken to recover evidence from such highly irradiated area. The STAR accelerator has been used as an efficient way to simulate exposure to high radiation alpha particles. A large number of different DNA samples have been irradiated to evaluate whether credible evidence can be obtained from such samples. A second study looks at how alpha particle irradiation impacts the recovery of fingerprints from different surfaces.

      •         Australian Educational Publishing Awards 2009 - Professor John Dodson

      • Ligare logo 2009 The Australian Publishers Association is pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2009 Australian Educational Publishing Awards. Over 200 entries were received, and judging was completed in May.

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        The book 'The Australian Physical Environment' (Oxford University Press) by Howard Bridgman (U of Newcastle), Deirdre Dragovich (U of Sydney) and John Dodson (ANSTO) is one of five shortlisted for the Tertiary Wholly Australian Single Title Award.

      April 2009

      • Professor John Dodson presented a talk to the Palamedia Sustainability Exchange on Thursay 9th April in which he outlined the applications nuclear methods in environmental science. ANSTO uses state of the art nuclear technology to address environmental issues including climate change, water resource sustainability and air pollution. "For example, dating ground water, stalagmites and ice cores tell us about water age, rainfall levels and methane sources from the past to help us better understand future patterns by improving climate models." For more details, please click on the presentation.

      February 2009

      • Matt Fischer has received funding to be a Visiting Research Fellow, as part of a large NERC grant titled A calibrated climate record from Gibraltar speleothem: the instrumental era, the Holocene and the last interglacial. The study led by Professor Dave Mattey (U. of London), with coinvestigators from U. Birmingham and U. Bristol, will investigate the modern isotope climatology of the western Mediterranean, and use speleothems to generate interannual climate records over century-millenial timescales. In contrast to recent weather events in southeast Australia, the 2009 winter in some western European nations has been one of the coldest and snowiest in decades.

      January 2009

      • Dr Tim Payne recieved a significant external grant from the Australian Academy of Science to undertake an exchange program in 2009-10 with the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Dr Payne will be collaborating with Professor Chin Pan in research focused on the assessment of contaminant retention properties of geologic materials integration and optimisation of characterisation techniques to facilitate best practice in site selection.

      September 2008

      • A special issue of Quaternary International entitled "The Great Arc of Human Dispersal" and edited by John Dodson is now in press.

      • New statistical techniques have been developed for source apportionment and back trajectory methods in fine particulate air pollution studies. This has been made possible by the large amounts of data obtainable from ANSTOs STAR accelerator. These techniques are being applied in the Australian East Coast Aerosol Dust Sampling Project, which commenced in July 2008, and in an International Atomic Energy Agency / Regional Cooperative Agreement project on Long Range and Transboundary Transport of Air Pollution in Asia. These new methods were presented by David Cohen as an invited talk to the European Conference of X-ray Spectrometry, in Croatia in June 2008.

      • Our Accelerator Science project has completed a collaborative study with Karin Sowada from Ancient History at Macquarie University to authenticate and date mummies and corresponding coffins from the Nicholson Museum at the University of Sydney. The results will be presented at the 2008 Mummy Congress with subsequent publications, reported in the Journal of Archaeological Science and used in the museum exhibits.

      • An important milestone in establishing the feasibility of using the IRMS++ instrument for oxygen isotope ratio measurements was achieved by its deadline of 31July. The milestone required that the oxygen background level in the instrument be demonstrated to be consistently less than 5% of the oxygen measurement level. Because oxygen is a ubiquitous contaminant in ultra-high vacuum systems, this was a challenging problem and we had sought help from experts around Australia. Background oxygen levels have now been achieved at 1%, through a combination of new procedures and careful component re-design. The main gain has come from a new plasma-cleaning procedure.

      • ANSTO has established collaboration with scientists from the Institute for the Study of the Earths Interior at Okayama University (Japan). Karina Meredith, a postdoctoral fellow jointly funded by ANSTO and the University of Wollongong, recently spent a month at Okayama University developing methodologies for analysing the non-traditional isotopes of δ7Li and δ11B in surface water and groundwaters. This innovative research is expanding the applications of these isotopes and will advance understanding of salinisation problems within the Murray-Darling Basin under different climate scenarios.