Dr Nerilie Abram ‘Australia’s changing climate from the perspective of the past millennium’

Australia is known as a land of ‘droughts and flooding rains’, but how unusual were recent extremes like the Millennium Drought in south-east Australia, the 2011 floods in Queensland, and the decline in south-west WA rainfall since the 1970s?  And to what extent is human-induced climate change altering Australia’s rainfall patterns?  This talk will look at ways in which evidence can be unlocked from natural archives, such as corals and ice cores, to understand how different climate factors that impact Australian rainfall have evolved and interacted over the past millennium

Dr Nerilie Abram is a Future Fellow at the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences, and a Chief Investigator for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.  She is also leading an international author team for the special report on Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate being prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  Nerilie’s research focuses on reconstructing climate changes over the last 1,000 years, using a variety of methods including the chemical analysis of Antarctic ice cores and tropical reef corals. This provides valuable information about natural climate variability and the earliest stages of human-induced climate change, which can’t be assessed using traditional climate measurements