News and events

2011

• An international team of researchers headed by ANSTO discovered clean fresh water under the ground in outback Australia. This fresh was known as 'lenses' was uncovered near Cooper Creek in southwest Queensland and provides a potential insight into how ecosystems along out dry-land rivers are sustained.The information from this research will help scientists better understand the degree of exchange between water holes and underlying groundwater and the time scales involved in the formation of these water lenses.  
• John Twining is leaving ANSTO after 36 years at the Institute for Environment Research. John has provided quality service to ANSTO and all of ANSTO’s external clients and is moving on to pursue a more leisurely schedules known as “Retirement” We wish John and his family well.

2010

• Prof John Dodson edited a book entitled "Changing climates, Earth Systems and Society". The book covers state-of-the-art considerations on how climate change has and will deliver impacts on major globalised biophysical and societal themes that will affect the way the world functions. The book offers  state-of-the-art analysis of climate change impacts on societal relevant themes, features expert authorities who discuss the relationship of climate with each theme, provides globally relevant coverage and serves as a valuable reference for policy and decision makers.
• ANSTO will be building, installing and commissioning a new Centre for Accelerator Science (CAS) from September 2009 to July 2014. This is a major new initiative which will both consume significant existing resources and also require extra new resources once it has been commissioned.  CAS is constructing $21M of buildings to house two new accelerators and improved AMS sample preparation facilities. The Accelerator Science Project will then have 4 accelerators namly, STAR, ANTARES, 6MV IBA and AMS NES tandem and a IMV AMS machine to maintain, develop and operate.

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

• 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.