The article is published in the August 2010 edition of Nature. Dr You said a global network of cable monitoring could be used to record climate change.

“Since the first submarine communication cable was laid across the English Channel in 1850, more than a million kilometres of telecommunications cables have been laid on the ocean floor,” he said.

“The result is a valuable network that can provide information about the world’s oceans: electrical signals from the cables can yield information about the water they run through and cables can be used to provide power to and transmit data from observatories on the sea floor. Yet only a tiny fraction of the existing undersea cabling is used for scientific purposes.

“This is a missed opportunity. If the full potential of undersea cables could be harnessed, they would be hugely useful in monitoring the potential effects of climate change on ocean currents, temperature, and salinity as changed by melting ice, and in extending the global monitoring of seismicity.

“Telecommunications companies and the scientific community should be urged to work together to overcome these difficulties, to create a global network of undersea observation.”

Dr John You is a senior research associate at the University of Sydney Institute of Marine Science.

Researchers examining the fossil coral reef cores have found climate change has not been smooth and continuous.

The team has discovered the fossil reef that grew from the last Ice Age when global sea levels and climate were very different from today. The team, led by co-chief scientists Dr Webster, and Dr Yusuke Yokoyama from the University of Tokyo, have now begun investigating these cores and their unique archive of past sea-level and climate change and how the Great Barrier Reef responded to these major environmental changes.

The Great Barrier Reef Environmental Changes Expedition (GBREC) is the only expedition in Australian waters that forms part of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), which is a multi-million dollar international collaboration with US, Europe, Japan , Australia, New Zealand, China, and India, that explores Earth’s history and structure as it is recorded in seafloor sediments and rocks, and sub-seafloor environments.

The preliminary findings from the IODP Onshore Science Party held in Bremen, Germany in July unveiled fossil coral reefs up to 30,000 years old and showed how the reef ecosystem responded to rapid rises of sea level and changes in climate.

The investigation team recovered more than 225 metres of material from 34 holes at three key geographical locations on the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef.

The Great Barrier Reef is a significant site for the expedition because it is a tectonically inactive area situated a long way from glaciated regions that might bias global sea level reconstructions.

“The Great Barrier Reef is on a tectonically stable portion of the Earth’s crust and is a prime location to investigate sea level changes over the last 20,000 years including the final phase of the last ice age,” Dr Webster said.

Researchers examining the fossil coral reef cores have found climate change has not been smooth and continuous.

“Coral reefs are excellent sea-level indicators, and their accurate dating by mass spectrometry is critical for constraining the timing, rate and amplitude of deglaciation events.”

Although the investigations deal with past events in Earth history they can be very important to our understanding of how the modern Great Barrier Reef, a World Heritage Site since 1980, will respond to future changes.

Analysis of the cores will provide important insights into how robust the reef is over different timescales and under different environmental conditions and stresses such as changing sea level and sea-surface temperatures, changing sediment input and ocean chemistry.

“The expedition has provided us with a truly unique opportunity to test ecologic theories about coral reef resilience and the vulnerability of the Great Barrier Reef to future climate change,” Dr Webster said.

A preliminary report of the GBREC Expedition is due to be released in the next six to eight weeks. A more detailed report of the expedition and scientific papers concerning the findings will be released later next year.

The GBREC Expedition is a European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD) contribution to the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP).

Developed in collaboration with waste technology specialist, Ziltek Pty Ltd, the technique means that the presence of petroleum hydrocarbons can now be quantified simply by using a hand-held infrared spectrometer to take readings at the site of interest, without the need to take samples or perform any kind of processing.

“Petroleum hydrocarbons are a valuable resource, but can also be pretty nasty environmental contaminants,”
Sean Forrester, CSIRO scientist

The technique could be used for oil exploration purposes. It will also be particularly useful in assessing and monitoring contaminated sites such as coastal land following off-shore oil spills and industrial sites planned for urban redevelopment.

“Petroleum hydrocarbons are a valuable resource, but can also be pretty nasty environmental contaminants,” says CSIRO scientist, Sean Forrester.

“They can remain in the environment for extended periods of time and can be harmful to wildlife, plants and humans. Better tools to detect them makes a rapid response possible.”

The technique uses an infrared signal to detect the presence of petroleum hydrocarbons in samples.

By contrast, current methods use sampling and processing techniques that are labour intensive, time consuming, require sensitive equipment and are not well suited to on-site analysis.

“The ability of this new technique to rapidly detect the presence of contaminants at the site has the potential to provide significant cost advantages, in terms of reduced testing costs and the avoidance of delays,” Mr Forrester says.

“Rapid analysis allows immediate measures to be undertaken to prevent further contamination or to limit contaminant spread.”

A significant portion of the time and financial costs involved in assessing and remediating contaminated sites is consumed by monitoring and analysis.

By decreasing analysis time and reducing costs this new technique can assist in the fast and effective identification of oil and other petroleum products in the environment, as well as treatment and protection of environmental assets threatened by petroleum contamination.

The breakthrough was made by Thomas Jennewein, Hannes Hübel, Deny Hamel and Kevin Resch of the University of Waterloo, Canada, along with Alessandro Fedrizzi of the University of Queensland, Australia and Sven Ramelow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

The international research team achieved a longstanding milestone in quantum optics research — the direct generation of photon triplets. This result has been sought for years but never achieved until now.

“This is going to open a new frontier of quantum optics and allow a new class of experiments in quantum computing using photons,” lead investigator Associate Professor Thomas Jennewein said.

In the past, the generation of pairs of photons (particles of light) revolutionized quantum optics and made possible emerging technologies such as quantum cryptography and quantum computing with photons.

Typically, these photon pairs were created from strong lasers sent through a crystal — a process known as “parametric down-conversion.”

In the new approach, researchers created photon triplets by producing a first pair of photons using an optical crystal, then splitting one of the photon pairs further into two additional photons inside a second crystal.

It’s a process that was first conceived 20 years ago, but had never before been experimentally observed.

Because each triplet originates from a single pump photon, the quantum correlations will extend over all three photons in a manner not achievable when using independently created photon pairs.

It is expected that this photon-triplet source will allow tests of novel quantum correlations, and will greatly advance photonic quantum computing.

“It shows the value of a very strong team and a great environment for allowing breakthroughs to happen,”Dr Jennewein said.

In their publication, titled “Direct generation of photon triplets using cascaded photon-pair sources,” the researchers explain that these tripartite quantum correlations will significantly advance quantum information research.

Release by Nature: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100728/full/news.2010.381.html

The PM’s policy is the same tired old approach that’s failed for decades.

On taking office, Julia Gillard was quick to announce the government had “lost its way” on several issues. We in the mental health community were excited about the prospect of her leadership – as the daughter of a psychiatric nurse and as a former shadow minister for health, she has a strong background on the issue.

Read more at the University of Sydney.

So much heat, so much wasted time and energy. That could be a description of the political debate on climate change, or of the state of Australia’s energy and climate change predicament. Either way, climate change has already proved its political potency. Now we need our governments to prove its transformative and economic power. We have no time to waste.

Waste is at the core of the problem. Over the past three years the climate change debate has been stranded by politics and the language of fear, blame, cost and complexity. Precious time has been squandered in the politicisation of climate change. It descended into a campaign against climate scientists, replete with assertions that controlling waste and pollution would cripple the future prosperity of the country.

Samantha Mostyn is director of the Institute for Sustainable Solutions.

Media enquiries: Sarah Stock, 9114 0748, , sarah.stock@sydney.edu.au

Read the full article at the University of Sydney.

Chances are, you have not heard much about Climategate lately, but last November it dominated the media. Three weeks before the Copenhagen summit, thousands of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were published on a Russian website.

The research institute was a leading contributor to the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, and some of the leaked emails showed the scientists in a poor light.

Read more at the University of Sydney.

Dr Lyn Cook, from the School of Biological Sciences, used ancient DNA sequencing to disprove the popular myth that cabbage palms were here before Australia split from the ancient continent of Gondwana.

Dr Cook said cabbage palms (Livistona species) were commonly thought to be relics of ancient rainforests that once covered much of Australia.

“Many plants and animals in Australia today have arrived since the Australian continent became isolated from the rest of Gondwana – especially many grasses, daisies and chenopods,” Dr Cook said.

“We found that cabbage palms entered Australia sometime in the last 16 million years, long after the former super-continent of Gondwana had broken up, and that they probably came from South-east Asia.

“Australia has been drifting closer to South-east Asia since it separated from Gondwana, and the shorter distances have allowed more dispersal of plants and animals between South-east Asia and Australia.”

Dr Cook said cabbage palms seemed to be ‘pre-adapted’ to fire and seasonal climates, making them ideally suited to life in the Australian monsoon tropics.

“We also found that the palms of Palm Valley in central Australia are very similar to palms in the northernmost parts of the Northern Territory,” she said.

“They possibly dispersed into central Australia along water courses that today flow only when there is cyclonic rainfall but which had good flows at several times in the past.

“The palms of Palm Valley are special because they cling to life in a very tough environment, but they have only been there for less than one or two million years.

“They were not there when the area was rainforest about 30 million years ago.”

Dr Rongkun Zheng with Professor Simon Ringer

After hosting a successful spintronics symposium at the Shanghai Expo, the University of Sydney has been chosen as the venue for the 2011 Worldwide Universities Network spintronics conference.

The event will be held in November next year and will bring some of the world’s leading spintronics researchers to Sydney. Dr Rongkun Zheng, an ARC Australian Research Fellow in the Australian Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis (ACMM) at the University, said the conference had become one of the most important gatherings of spintronics experts.

It has previously been held in Europe, Asia and America. Spintronics research focuses on the spinning ability of electrons, which can be exploited to produce new ways of processing information in electrical circuits. Scientists hope it will lead to a new generation of faster, smaller and more powerful electronic devices

Last month Dr Zheng and his colleague Professor Simon Ringer, Director of the ACMM, organised the University’s spintronics symposium at the Shanghai Expo, attended by some of China’s leading researchers.

“It was a very good opportunity to show the depth and scale of our research and promote our links with Chinese partners,” said Dr Zheng. “It was also a great opportunity to promote the University in China, and according to the feedback from the Chinese speakers and audience, it has helped to strengthen our presence in China.

” The Worldwide Universities Network is a group of 16 research-led universities engaged in global research collaboration. Its chief executive is Professor John Hearn, Deputy Vice-Chancellor International at the University of Sydney.

Contact: Richard North, International Media and Communications Manager Phone: 02 9351 3191 Email: richard.north@sydney.edu.au