Intrepid Science Blog

Sydney declares a climate emergency – what does that mean in practice? Chris Turney , UNSW Late on Monday night, the City of Sydney became the second state capital in Australia (after Hobart a week earlier ) to officially declare a climate emergency . With climate change considered a threat to human life, Sydney councillors unanimously supported a motion put forward by Lord Mayor Clover Moore to mobilise city resources to reduce carbon emissions and minimise the impact of future change. The decision sees Sydney join a variety of local and national governments around the world, in a movement that is increasingly gaining momentum . In total, some 658 local governments around the world have made the same declaration, with the UK and Canada committing their national governments to the global movement in just the past two months . An official declaration of climate emergency puts a government on a “wartime mobilisation” that places climate change at the centre of policy and plannin...

UK becomes first country to declare a 'climate emergency' Days of protest by Extinction Rebellion have brought parts of London to a standstill. Shutterstock Chris Turney , UNSW On Wednesday night a bipartisan UK Parliament passed an extraordinary measure: a national declaration of an Environment and Climate Emergency. The UK is the first national government to declare such an emergency. The decision marks a renewed sense of urgency in tackling climate change, following a visit to Parliament by teenage activist Greta Thunberg , the broadcast of David Attenborough’s documentary Climate Change: The Facts and 11 days of protest by environmental group Extinction Rebellion that paralysed parts of London . Read more: Extinction Rebellion: disruption and arrests can bring social change There are now some 49 million people living under national, city and local declarations of a climate emergency aro...

Australia’s epic story: a tale of amazing people, amazing creatures and rising seas We have so much more to learn about Australia. Shutterstock/Lev Savitskiy Michael Bird , James Cook University ; Alan Cooper , University of Adelaide ; Chris Turney , UNSW ; Darren Curnoe , UNSW ; Lynette Russell , Monash University , and Sean Ulm , James Cook University The Australian continent has a remarkable history — a story of isolation, desiccation and resilience on an ark at the edge of the world. It is a story of survival, ingenuity, and awe-inspiring achievements over many years. Shortly after the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, Australia was torn from the supercontinent of Gondwana by immense tectonic forces and began its long, lonely, journey north towards the equator . The lush temperate forests of Gondwana slowly disappeared as the Australian landmass pushed north, preserving a snapshot of faunal life from a much earlier evoluti...

How a change in climate wiped out the 'Siberian unicorn' An artist’s impression of Siberian unicorns ( Elasmotherium ) walking in the steppe grass on a cloudy day. Shutterstock/Elenarts Kieren Mitchell , University of Adelaide ; Adrian Lister , Natural History Museum ; Alan Cooper , University of Adelaide , and Chris Turney , UNSW A mysterious shaggy giant species of rhinoceros – named the Siberian unicorn due to its enormous single horn – turns out to have survived in western Russia until just 36,000 years ago, according to research published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution . This extinction date means that the Siberian unicorn’s final days were shared with early modern humans and Neanderthals. Previously, little was known about the creature thought to have become extinct more than 200,000 years ago. But genetic analysis and radiocarbon dating have begun to reveal many aspects of how it lived, and when it died out. A k...

Why remote Antarctica is so important in a warming world Chris Fogwill , Keele University ; Chris Turney , UNSW , and Zoe Robinson , Keele University Ever since the ancient Greeks speculated a continent must exist in the south polar regions to balance those in the north , Antarctica has been popularly described as remote and extreme. Over the past two centuries, these factors have combined to create, in the human psyche, an almost mythical land – an idea reinforced by tales of heroism and adventure from the Edwardian golden age of “heroic exploration” and pioneers such as Robert Falcon Scott , Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton . Recent research , however, is casting new light on the importance of the southernmost continent, overturning centuries of misunderstanding and highlighting the role of Antarctica in how our planet works and the role it may play in a future, warmer world. Heroic exploration, 1913. wiki ...

There’s an old sailor’s expression: “Below 40 degrees south there is no law, below 50 degrees south there is no God.” Since the sixteenth century, sailors have spoken in awe of the violent westerly winds and seas they experienced fighting their way across the Southern Ocean. With few landmasses to slow them down, the winds found across 40 degrees latitude often reach speeds of twenty-five knots—about 40 percent stronger than their northern hemisphere counterparts—earning them the title the “roaring forties.” As shipping pushed farther south, explorers realized that these winds form part of a vast storm belt that includes the “furious fifties” and “screaming sixties,” names more reminiscent of terrible rock bands than a major part of our planet’s circulation system. The early hunters and traders didn’t understand it at the time, but these winds are created by a procession of low-pressure systems carried east by the jet stream, a river of cold air hurtling and twisting round the Antarct...

New research suggests something like the movie The Day After Tomorrow may have happened in the past, with sobering implications for the future. In this blockbuster, melting Arctic ice led to dramatic cooling across the Northern Hemisphere, highlighting the paradox that in a warming world, some regions may indeed cool (or at least not warm as much as expected). Whilst no one is suggesting this could lead to a new ice age, climate model projections do suggest some parts of the world may respond differently to long-term warming. One of the big uncertainties is the impact a melting Greenland ice sheet might have across the North Atlantic. At a simple level, the world’s oceans are connected as though by one enormous conveyor belt. At one end of the loop, warm tropical waters popularly known as the Gulf Stream drift up into the North Atlantic where over the course of a year the evaporating surface delivers heat downwind equivalent to the output from a million power stations. It’s a major r...

Here at Intrepid Science we focus a lot of effort on trying to better reconstruct past climate and environmental change. The main reason is that by understanding what happened when in the recent geologic record we can reduce the uncertainties surrounding future climate change and its impact(s). But don’t be misled by the term ‘geologic record’. Basically we’re looking beyond the historic record of scientific observations by reading what’s preserved in the landscape – what are sometimes described as ‘natural archives’. Nature has a fabulously diverse library and can include trees, corals and even ice cores. The real test is finding these ‘books’. As a result, the team work around the world unearthing new records. One of our most recent projects is to reconstruct changing drought across eastern Australia and New Zealand over the last 500 years. When Australia experiences a drought, it can cause billions of dollars of environmental and economic damage. A classic example is the ‘Millenniu...

We're very excited. We have a new research paper out using swamp kauri called 'Decadally resolved Lateglacial radiocarbon evidence from New Zealand kauri'. Using ancient trees buried in bogs in Northland, we've been able to stitch together a decade-by-decade record of atmospheric radioactive carbon levels during the end of the last ice age. The result is we have tied together tree-ring records from Europe and New Zealand to significantly improve the radiocarbon timescale, allowing archaeologists and Earth scientists to better understand what happened when over the past 14,200 years. It's taken more than ten years of research but it feels like we've made a big step forward! Swamp kauri over 10,000 years old If you'd like to learn more, the research paper is published in the Cambridge University Press journal Radiocarbon at  https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/decadally-resolved-lateglacial-radiocarbon-evidence-from-new-zealan...

CSIRO cuts: as redundancies are announced, the real cost is revealed Chris Turney , UNSW Australia The unfortunate manner in which the latest phase of restructuring of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has played out has raised questions about Australia’s scientific capability and our ability to meet international responsibilities. Faced with a budget cut of A$115 million, some 275 staff have apparently been identified for redundancy ( though the final number may be as high as 317 ). Many of them are scientists contributing to long-term sea, air and climate science programs. The restructure is geared towards focusing CSIRO’s attention on the question, as framed by chief executive Larry Marshall, of “ how can we find solutions for the climate we will be living with? ” The problem is that the programs at threat form the backbone of national and international research efforts. Virtually all of them are critical for helping us mitigate and ...