This talk was part of the 2024 PhD Showcase held on 6 October 2024.

Dr Tobias Stål, winner of the 2023 RST Doctoral (PhD) Award, is a geophysicist focusing on understanding Antarctica’s deep and shallow structure and properties. He completed his PhD at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania in 2021. The focus of his PhD research was a study of the Antarctic lithosphere revealed by multivariate analysis.

The Antarctic continent, with an area of about 14 million km², is larger than Australia; yet due to the ice cover and inaccessibility, its geology and lithospheric structure are to a large extent unknown. Advancing our understanding of the Antarctic continent addresses fundamental knowledge gaps in plate tectonics and understanding the interactions between the solid Earth and the cryosphere.

Dr Stål’s PhD research addressed challenging topics, such as the identification of sub-ice lithospheric boundaries, and the determination of a new geothermal heat flow model for the continent of Antarctica. The research was enabled by innovations in computational and statistical methodologies, including the development of a new software library to enable the multivariate approaches that were ground-breaking for Antarctica.

Since graduating, Dr Stål has taken up a Research Associate position in computation physics at the School of Natural Sciences, funded by the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence in Antarctic Science.

This talk was part of the 2024 PhD Showcase held on 6 October 2024.

Katie Marx is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Humanities, College of Arts, Law and Education. Her doctoral research focused on the concept of place attachment in Hobart, an Antarctic gateway city. From this, she has built an interest in exploring how we can support members of the public to form a meaningful relationship with remote places (such as Antarctica) that they themselves may never visit. Katie has a professional background in community development; a skillset that she draws upon when examining methods for increasing public participation in the conservation of the polar regions.

Along with Professor Elizabeth Leane, Katie is the current co-lead of the Public Engagement with Antarctic Research Action Group within the international Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. She has tutored in a range of subjects, including environmental communication and marine and Antarctic governance, and she tends to spend her summers working as a historian and guide with tour operators on the Antarctic peninsula.

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In the face of mounting environmental and political challenges, it is more important than ever for members of the public to understand and care about Antarctica. Little is known, however, about the types of strategies that work (or don’t work) when it comes to engaging the public in Antarctic matters. In this talk, Dr Katie Marx shares the findings from her PhD research, which used Hobart as a case study to explore what the Antarctic sector can do to support community members to develop a stronger relationship with the far south.

Dr Matthew Cracknell is a Senior Lecturer in Geodata Analytics for the Discipline of Earth Sciences and the Centre for Ore Deposit and Earth Sciences (CODES) at UTas. Prior to his current position, he held many short-term research and teaching positions at CODES, the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre (ACE CRC) and the School of Humanities, University of Tasmania. He also currently leads the CODES Research Program for Geophysics and computational geosciences.

Matthew received a BSc (Hons) in geophysics in 2009 and a PhD in Computational Geophysics in 2014, both from UTas. Before entering academia he was employed as a consultant geoscientist and GIS analyst for a variety of public and private bodies.

The Earth was formed over four billion years ago and has evolved by three principal evolutions, Continental Drift as the ‘boats’, Plants and Animals as the ‘passengers’ that travelled through the Climatic Zones and evolved under the influence of glaciations.”

Most geologists assign the discovery of Continental Drift to Alfred Wegener in the early twentieth century, but the Minoans could ‘map’ the stars and sail from Crete to the mouths of the Nile River, 4,000 years ago.

The first mapped, movement of continents is seen in the reproduction of Eratosthenes’ of c.220BCE, followed by Ortelius’ 1596 map, then via geological and botanical advances and retreats until Professor S W Carey’s cartographically accurate map presented in Hobart in 1956, which put Continental Drift beyond doubt.

The major steps on this path from the Ancient Greeks to ‘get the Drift’ include a disproportionate number of visitors to Tasmania including the botanist Labillardiere in 1793, Charles Darwin the geologist in 1831, Joseph Dalton Hooker the botanist from 1839 and then ‘the locals’, the most recent being a lecture two months ago to the Royal Society by Dr Keith Corbett.

From this firmer historical basis, John will propose a pulsing Earth with a low but significant rate of expansion, contrary to the current paradigm of Plate Tectonics, an interpretation of Carey’s 1956, New Global Tectonics.