Tracking 600,000 years of flooding and aridification in Australia’s deserts. This project aims to provide unprecedented understanding of how tropical rainfall promotes excessive wet pulses and floods

Description

Tracking 600,000 years of flooding and aridification in Australia’s deserts. This project aims to provide unprecedented understanding of how tropical rainfall promotes excessive wet pulses and floods in Australia’s iconic dry, desert interior. This is achieved by developing a 600,000 year record of tropical rainfall and river runoff to the desert, becoming the longest and most continuous sedimentary climate record from the Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre Basin. Outcomes will unravel the global climate conditions that fostered extensive wet pulses in the past, providing unprecedented reference for the period of human migration and extinction of megafauna during the last 65,000 years. Outcomes will also inform how the desert responds to flooding, relevant to constrain risk to agriculture, infrastructure, and ecologic habitats.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 3709 - Physical Geography and Environmental Geoscience. Lead: Dr Alexander Francke