Published on the 23rd February 2022 by ANSTO Staff
ANSTO radiocarbon facilities and scientists are featured in a new IMAX documentary film released in the United States.
Angkor 3D: The Lost Empire of Cambodia, a film by Australian director Murray Pope, is now screening at the California Science Centre in Los Angeles with a concurrent exhibition organised in association with the Cambodian government.
The film unveils the mysteries behind the Angkorian Empire, its demise, including footage of Dr Quan Hua and the accelerator mass spectrometry facility at the Lucas Heights campus.
Pope came to ANSTO in late 2019/early 2020 and spent several days on-site, as he was featuring the work of scientists at Angkor in the production.
At the time, Dr Hua was a member of a team working on a speleothem from a cave in southern Cambodia to reveal climate change during the medieval period.
Dr Hua has contributed to international collaborative research on Angkor and has taken several field trips to Cambodia.
Radiocarbon dating of the speleothem using accelerator mass spectrometry at ANSTO’s Centre for Accelerator Science, in collaboration with Dr Duncan Cook from the Australian Catholic University and Associate Professor Dan Penny from the University of Sydney, has helped to reconstruct climate variability for Cambodia for the last millennium. It covers the entire Angkor period (circa the 9th-15th centuries).
Read more about Dr Hua’s research
At the height of its power between the 11th and 13th centuries, Angkor was a resplendent city, considered the most extensive urban complex of the pre-industrial world. But 19th-century European visitors found most of this capital of the Khmer empire was overrun by the surrounding forests. The people of Angkor left not a single word explaining why their kingdom was abandoned.
The film release was delayed because of COVID, according to Pope.
He hopes that the film gets to IMAX Melbourne in Australia or the new IMAX in Sydney when it is completed.
Scientist
