Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Ask any researcher about the challenges they face and you'll always hear there's simply not enough money to go around.
Yes, it's nearly budget time and scientists are keen to find out the actual research funding bottom line.
Meanwhile, they're applying for grants which have a 1 in 10 chance of being funded, at best. So on the Science Show this week, we ask, who will stand up for Australia's researchers?
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Chapter 2: What challenges do Australian researchers face in securing funding?
So when you hear about a temperature record from an ice core in Antarctica, it's isotopes, it's not temperature. When you think about sea level in the past and how we know that, it's isotopes, it's not sea level, they're just reconstructed as that. I tend to work more in environmental records, so using isotopes to look at vegetation and fire in the past.
We also can use it to look at what you eat when you're dead. Let's start with fire. If you were to go to a landscape and take some samples... Presumably you're doing it in the soil and places like that. Can you tell something about the fire history of that region? Not from the soil, but from a lake that's right next to it.
So lakes are little tape recorders, so they accumulate sediment from the bottom up. You go and you take your lake core and within that core there's charcoal that came from those fires and a lot of people count the charcoal to see how much fire was there. If you add the isotopes for the charcoal and you can tell what was burning, was it a grassland or was it a forest?
And that in turn relates back to climate. And what we've shown in the Northern Territory is that you can use the isotopes and other measures to show that indigenous fire regimes were established there at least 11,000 years ago and possibly 40,000 years ago.
Chapter 3: How do grant success rates impact the research community in Australia?
Do you mean it started possibly 40,000 years ago and continued until 11,000 years ago or what? potentially started 40,000 years ago. We don't have all the markers back that far from 11,000 years ago. We can definitively say that the sort of cool burning that Aboriginal people did up here in this part of the world was established and was maintained through till European invasion.
You see a difference 11,000 years ago in the samples. Yes, basically the isotope composition changes so you see more grass burning and we know from the pollen what the total vegetation was. And so we can say it was the grass burning, it wasn't hot fires, which is what you tend to get without humans or with European humans.
So that change, which is unique in 150,000 years, can be reliably attributed to indigenous fire management. So that was a sophisticated way of treating the landscape, even those many thousands of years back. Yes, it was managing the land for biodiversity, for safety, really, for promoting food resources, animal and plant. So it was used in a very sophisticated fashion earlier in the year.
And yeah, people were doing it from 11,000 years ago, probably from 40,000 years ago. Why before did you mention the icebergs and the water flow? So periodically in the last 130,000 years ago, maybe 10 times, there were rapid melting events of the northern ice sheets and those icebergs flowed out into North Atlantic and melted and so the seawater became fresher.
And the Gulf Stream, which is a warm current that flows up the East Coast, couldn't dive down and return to the deep ocean circulation. The East Coast is the U.S., sorry. And ordinarily, it dives down and rejoins the major ocean circulation pattern, but it stops. So you get a buildup of heat in the northern hemisphere, And that causes droughts in China.
And with that same record from the fire record, we can also show that Heinrich events caused it to be incredibly wet up here for periods of relatively short, geologically speaking, let's say a thousand years. Did you say Heinrich events? Heinrich events named after Professor Dr. Heinrich, not Heimlich.
He was the one that found these little pebbles in deep ocean sediments that could have only got there by being carried there by icebergs. And that's how they defined the Heinrich events. And it turns out to be a quite important driver of climate. And potentially we're messing with that now.
And if the Gulf Stream shuts down again and it's slowing, then we can expect it to get very wet in northern Australia. So it makes sense you're doing work on that from here, northern Australia, as you said. This is a good vantage point from which to do it. Yeah, it's been worked on in the Northern Hemisphere.
The good thing about being in Australia is there's not that many of us, so we've still got to do a lot of stuff. And there was a big gap in terms of how Heinrich events might influence the Southern Hemisphere and Australia in particular, or the Australian region. And it took a long time to sort out. It wasn't like we were looking for Heinrich events. We got a record.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of isotopes in understanding environmental changes?
And that's what I'm in the job for. I say, did you know when you were beginning your work, say as a student, and then I'm doing chemistry, therefore I'm sitting in a lab squirting all sorts of liquids, or I'm a geologist, I'm going to work for a mining company.
All those predictable things lapse when you look around as to what you could possibly be doing, ranging from icebergs to forests like you. Well, I always thought I was going to be an exploration geologist, and my first job was actually in Borneo looking for gold. They ended up throwing somebody out of a helicopter a few years after I was there.
No, they didn't expect it, but it was certainly terminal. That was years after I was there, but it's actually...
kind of boring if you're at the bottom you're just putting dirt in bags day in day out so i came back and did a phd and ended up where i am today but it's been a random walk of opportunities all of which i tried to ensure allow me to do good work and go to interesting places and not have to kill people Not have to kill people. That's very interesting, yes.
But do you accept that association with being a detective, trying to work out a big story from tiny clues? It's very much detective work. I mean, I said you're a bag of isotopes, and a lot of the work with isotopes is related to your isotopic composition. So I could tell from your hair...
Not that you have that much left, but if you went to Finland and came back and you didn't cut your hair in the interim, I could take your hair and I could tell you you'd been to Finland. And if you ate a lot of fish there, I could tell that. And after you're dead, I could do the same things with your fingernails, your bones, with your teeth.
And this is actually used forensically in the modern day, but it's also used widely in archaeology. And that's one of the things that we're getting into. And finally, a story we did a couple of weeks ago about a chemist, actually an astronomical chemist, who was brought in in LA to work out why there was so much lead around after the fires. You wouldn't have been surprised, would you?
No, because the way you would track that lead is, you guessed it, it would be the lead isotope composition. And they would be relating that, I believe it was related to houses. So it would be lead pipes or lead flashing or whatever that would have come from somewhere different. And it would be distinct from the lead isotope composition in the soil or in the water. And you'd be able to tell that.
Professor Michael Bird from James Cook University, how do you feel about being described as a big bag of elements, Belle?
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