SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 7 - 9 may 2008

Awards and admission of new Fellows

Thursday, 8 May 2008

Mawson Medal

Professor Peter Cawood
Tectonics Special Research Centre, School of Earth and Geographical Sciences, University of Western Australia

Peter Cawood's research is concerned with field-based studies of mountain belts and what they tell us about the way the Earth has looked and behaved through time. His work ranges in scale from global reconstructions to microscopic examination of mineral grains. He has worked in mountain belts ranging in age from Archean (greater than 2,500 million years) to Recent, and from many disparate geographic areas around the globe. Each mountain belt is unique, showing different levels of exposure of the Earth’s crust and the processes that melded it, as well as how these processes have evolved over the 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history.

Making mountains: Geological drivers and environmental consequences

Mountains are one of the key manifestations that we live on a dynamic planet. They impact on atmosphere and water interactions, with consequences for climate and the distribution and evolution of life. The Terra Australis mountains were a major mountain belt that extended some 18,000 kilometres along the edge of the Gondwanan supercontinent from eastern Australia to South America. A major pulse of contraction along the Terra Australis mountains, some 300 million years ago, marks a major change in global climate. Prior to this time, Gondwana was glaciated by the longest ice age recorded in Earth’s history (90 to 200 million years), which caused 100 to 250 metre changes in global-sea level and was marked by the accumulation of the Earth’s temperate zone coal basins. Termination of the glaciation and change to a relatively protracted phase of warm global temperatures, corresponds with the development of the Terra Australis mountains.