Presentation by Chris Sharples
The Royal Society Room
Tuesday, 2nd November 2010 Commencing 8.00 pm until 10.00 pm
About the Speaker
Chris Sharples is a geologist who graduated from the University of Tasmania with an Honours degree in geology in 1979, and subsequently obtained a Master of Science degree in geology in 1990. However after working in coal and oil shale exploration for only a couple of years during the early 1980’s he soon decided that wasn’t to be his future, and gradually shifted his focus to geomorphology and its relevance to environmental management issues. Chris has worked on a wide range of landform conservation and hazards issues since about 1992, initially as a project officer for the Forest Practices Unit and subsequently as a consultant to Forestry Tasmania, as well as consulting for numerous other public and private sector clients. Since about 1998 much of his work has focussed in particular on coastal erosion and sea-level rise issues, and in 2009 he completed a major contract for Geoscience Australia and the Department of Climate Change during which he and Richard Mount co-ordinated a team compiling a detailed nationally-consistent coastal landform map for the entire Australian coast. Whilst it will have many other uses, this map was a key dataset used in the Australian First Pass National Coastal Vulnerability Assessment completed in 2009 for the Department of Climate Change. Chris has been based at the University of Tasmania since 2007, initially as an Honorary Research Associate and currently as a Research Fellow, however despite this he continues to successfully resist overt and covert pressures to do a Ph.D.
