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...

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 ...

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...

At the end of the last ice age (11,000 to 18,000 years ago), the world suddenly lost some of the most remarkable creatures that ever roamed our planet. Patagonia in southern South America was particularly rich in creatures that could only be labelled bizarre today: elephant-sized sloths, giant jaguar, powerful sabre-toothed cats and an enormous one-tonne short-faced bear (the largest ever land-based mammalian carnivore). What caused their demise is  one of the big geological whodunnits.  Last year you may remember we had a research paper published in Science that looked at megafaunal extinction in North America and Eurasia . Whilst warming looked like it was a driver of the extinctions in the Northern Hemisphere, there was a tantalising hint that humans had also played a role. But disentangling the effects of both was challenging.  To test their roles we have extended our work to Patagonia and the results are now published in the The American Association for the Advan...