SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 7 - 9 may 2008

Awards and admission of new Fellows

Thursday, 8 May 2008

Dorothy Hill Award

Dr Sandra McLaren
University of Melbourne

Sandra McLaren grew up and was educated at Murray Bridge in country South Australia. She obtained her PhD from the University of Adelaide in 2001 and has undertaken postdoctoral research at the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra. She is currently the Centenary Research Fellow in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Sandra has broad research interests in the field of Earth sciences, and has focused much of her work on understanding the long term evolution of the Australian continent. She is currently working on a project investigating the record of environmental change in the Murray Basin over the last 4 to 5 million years.

Reading the rock record: Our geological past and our energy future

Climate change and Australia's energy future are two of the most pressing problems of our time. The rock record preserves evidence of the rates and timescales of past environmental change, and the factors that have controlled atmosphere, ocean and continental evolution. Consequently, geoscientists are ideally placed to inform our understanding of these problems and to provide perspectives on solutions for our future. For example, sediments preserved in the Murray Basin record the change from humid wet environments to the arid climatic conditions that characterise much of Australia today. The record of past evolution informs our understanding of factors controlling climate systems. Over longer geological timescales, we can show that the evolution of the Australian continent has been shaped in part by unusual enrichments in heat-producing elements, uranium, thorium and potassium. As well as influencing our geological past, this heat producing element enrichment has the potential to provide both nuclear and geothermal energy for our future.