Alison Kelsey, PhD graduate of the University of Qld School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, was awarded a $3000 travel grant by the Australian Environmental Foundation.  

The grant enabled Alison to present her work in a paper at the recent European Geophysical Union conference, in Vienna, during April 2018.

The AEF Board has awarded the grant from its Bob Carter Memorial Fund, a fund set up to commemorate the life and work of the late Professor Bob Carter, a world-renowned geologist and marine scientist who passed away in January 2016.

Alison’s PhD thesis  investigated and demonstrated an astronomical mechanism as the cause of cycles of natural climate change of around 1,500 years in length. Her research was based on an analysis of the palaeoclimatic record of Fraser Island in Queensland and other Australian regional records.   The memorial association with Bob Carter’s work is apt; Bob was variously Chairman of an Australian Research Grants panel and Chairman of the Department of Earth Sciences at James Cook University from  from 1998 to 2005 and a visiting research professor in geology and geophysics at the University of Adelaide from 2001 to 2005.  Bob was well known as a “climate contrarian” who in the fullness of time will be proven right, wrong, or some position in-between.  He debated marine geology and climate issues in public with courtesy and objectivity – he would be advising the same approach by Alison Kelsey and all recent graduates.

A Call for Papers by the EGU for a special session on natural cycles in climate change brought about 12 papers on the subject (cycles from decadal to multi-millennial) of which Alison’s contribution is but one.

Michael Asten
Associate Editor for Education Matters, Preview, Australian Society of Exploration Geophysicists