The advancement of knowledge
The Royal Society of Tasmania congratulates President Prof. Ross Large on the award of the Society’s most prestigious medal, the Royal Society of Tasmania Medal, for his research in the field of geology.
Samuel Pepys by John Hayls, c.1666 (National Portrait Gallery, London)
Founder of the modern English navy, President of the Royal Society, Member of Parliament, author of books on the navy, talented musician and composer and lover of a very large number of women, Samuel Pepys delighted in many aspects of Restoration London and recorded them all in his diary.
“And so to bed …”, Susannah Fullerton’s talk on Pepys, tells of his experience of the Plague and the Great Fire, his constant womanising, his theatre-going and his dinners. Susannah loves to share her enthusiasm for this most human and delightful of diarists.
Susannah Fullerton, OAM, FRS(N), has been president of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, this country’s largest literary society, for the past 22 years. She is the author of several books on Jane Austen and gives many talks around the world about her favourite novelist.
Susannah also gives talks at libraries, schools, the Art Gallery of NSW and State Library of NSW on many other famous writers, such as Pepys, Oscar Wilde, the Brontës, Dickens, Trollope and many more. She has written Brief Encounters: Literary Travellers in Australia about famous authors visiting Australia, and has also written and recorded two audio CDs, Finding Katherine Mansfield and Poetry to Fill a Room. Susannah also leads literary tours to the UK, France, Italy, Scandinavia, NZ and America for Australians Studying Abroad.
Tuesday 4th September 2018, 8:00 pm – The Royal Society Room, TMAG, Hobart
In recent years, the increased use of ‘drones’ in civilian applications has received both positive and negative coverage in the media. Many find the thought of flying robots that ‘invade’ people’s lives or pose risks to passenger airplanes too intimidating and unacceptable. However, this presentation will show that drones (preferably termed Unmanned Aircraft Systems or UAS) fill a novel and exciting niche when it comes to observing, mapping, and monitoring the environment at unprecedented levels of detail.
The TerraLuma research project at the University of Tasmania has developed novel tools and algorithms for environmental remote sensing applications and aerial surveys using UAS. We have worked on a range of applications, including precision agriculture and viticulture; mapping and monitoring vegetation in remote locations such as Antarctica; deriving 3D tree structure for forest inventories; landslide deformation monitoring; 3D stock pile and quarry surveys and volume estimations; assessment of coastal erosion; mapping of geological structures; better understanding functions of natural vegetation communities such as saltmarshes; transforming images into knowledge.
Associate Professor Lucieer will give an overview of the technology and exciting applications of UAS remote sensing. I will share our practical field experiences, our ups and downs, dos and don’ts from the last nine years of operating UAS for remote sensing research.
Arko Lucieer is an Associate Professor in Remote Sensing at The University of Tasmania, Australia. He leads the TerraLumaresearch group, focusing on the development and application of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), sensor integration, and image processing techniques for environmental, agricultural, and high-precision aerial mapping applications. Arko teaches remote sensing and GIS at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He obtained his PhD degree in 2004 from the International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) and Utrecht University in The Netherlands. His current focus is on quantitative remote sensing of vegetation with the use of sophisticated UAS sensors to better understand the structure, distribution, and functioning of vegetation, and to bridge the observational scale gap between field samples and satellite observations.
Members and friends are invited to attend The Royal Society of Tasmania Medal Presentation and Lecture, to be hosted at Government House by Her Excellency Professor the Honourable Kate Warner, AC, Governor of Tasmania. and Mr Warner at 6.00pm on Thursday 30 August 2018.
The recipient of the medal and lecturer is Emeritus Distinguished Professor Ross Large.
Earth has a pulse called plate tectonics and this pulse has controlled the formation of great mountain ranges, the chemistry of the oceans and the evolution of life over the last four billion years. The formation and break up of supercontinents, the supercontinent cycle, involves continental plates crashing together to build major mountain ranges. This process, in geological terms, was slow to get underway, occurring roughly every 400 to 600 million years in the early stages of Earth history.
However, about 600 million years ago, the plate tectonic and mountain building process sped up to a frequency of 60 to 120 million years. This change in the rhythms of Earth processes was fundamental to the evolution of life, starting with the Cambrian explosion at 550–520 million years ago, followed by cycles of rapid bio-diversification, then mass extinction.
Five cycles driven by plate tectonics and mountain building took place over the last 600 million years, each commencing with diversification of life and ending in a major mass extinction event. These constitute the rhythms of Earth and life.
Ross Large is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Geology at the University of Tasmania. He gained his BSc (Hons) from the University of Tasmania in 1969, PhD from University of New England in 1973 and an Honorary Doctor of Engineering from the University of Lulea, Sweden.
For ten years Ross worked in the mineral exploration industry. In 1984, he joined the University of Tasmania and, five years later, established the Centre for Ore Deposit and Exploration Science (CODES). Under his leadership, CODES grew to become recognised as one of the top industry collaborative ore deposit research centres in the world.
Ross has published over 120 scientific papers and is internationally recognised for his research on the genesis of ore deposits and relationships to Earth evolution. His current research interest is the chemistry of past oceans and relationships to evolution of life, mass extinction and mineral deposit cycles.
He has won many awards during his career – the most recent as lead scientist for a UTAS team that won the 2016 Eureka Prize for interdisciplinary research. Ross is the President of The Royal Society of Tasmania and the Chair of the Tasmanian Division of The Academy of Technology and Engineering.
You can hear Ross talking about his research on ABC Radio Hobart Breakfast with Ryk Goddard.
We invite you to register to attend The Royal Society of Tasmania Medal Presentation and Lecture at Government House at 6.00pm on Thursday 30 August 2018.
All attendees will need to book and print their tickets by Friday 17 August 2018.
The bookings for this event will open on Wednesday 1st August and close on Friday 17 August 2018.
There is no charge to obtain a ticket and these may be booked via the Government House website as follows:
We look forward to seeing you there.
David Wilson
Honorary Secretary
The program will commence with reports by Rose Donnelly (Year 12) and Dominic Grosewill (Year 10) on their experiences at the 2018 London International Youth ScienceForum and the YouthConference of the Australian & New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science.
This will be followed by Professor Binns’ lecture on the role of research in the diverse and complex disciplines in engineering.
Engineering is an inherently applied set of disciplines. As such research and development often involves little “r” and big “D”. However, the definition of engineering from Engineers Australia is stated as “Engineers arescientists, inventors, designers, builders and great thinkers. They improve the state of the world, amplify human capability and make people’s lives safer and easier.” Improving human capability requires research, research requires research training. To fulfil the expectations of engineering we need to have R&D Engineers qualified with PhDs. Jonathan will explain high level R&D from engineers in fast ferry design, submarine analysis and America’s Cup technology.
America’s Cup Series, 2017, Bermuda, J. Binns
Jonathan has trained and worked as a design and research engineer. His primary expertise is in a variety of model and full scale experiments as well as numerical flow predictions. He has experience in hydrodynamic and structural design, research, development and simulation of marine craft.
America’s Cup Series, 2017, Bermuda, J. Binns
Jonathan has taken a leading role in research across the whole of the Australian Maritime College in his roles as Associate Dean of Research and Director of the ARC Research Training Centre for Naval Design and Manufacturing (RTCNDM). The RTCNDM is a training centre whose mission is to create a new cohort of PhD trained engineers for the naval design, manufacturing and sustainment of a global supply chain.
Friday 10th August 2018, 6:00 pm – Stanley Burbury Theatre UTAS, Hobart
War is deeply woven into human history. Organised society and conflict appear to have marched side by side, each affecting the other. Wars have changed societies in many ways but changes in society have also affected the nature of war. We remember war, rightly, for its destructive impact but it has also led to advances in science, to improvements in the position of previously marginalized groups such as women, or to greater equality. This lecture will examine some of the paradoxes of war drawing on examples from history. Since it is a century since the end of the Great War particular attention will be paid to its causes and consequences.
Professor Margaret MacMillan is a Canadian historian at the University of Toronto and professor of International History at Oxford University, as well as a leading expert on history and international relations.
Professor MacMillan was educated at the University of Toronto and Oxford University. Her doctoral dissertation was on the social and political perspectives of the British in India. She is former provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto and was a member of the History Department of Ryerson University in Toronto for 25 years. She is the recipient of numerous literary awards for her book Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference on 1919 and its Attempt to End War.
MacMillan’s research has focused on the British Empire in the later 19thand early 20thcenturies and on international relations in the 20thcentury. She has served on the board of the Canadian Institute for International Affairs, the Atlantic Council of Canada, the Ontario Heritage Foundation, and the Churchill Society for the advancement of Parliamentary Democracy (Canada). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow of Massey College, University of Toronto. She is a Companion of the Order of Canada and a Companion of Honour (Commonwealth Realms).
Professor MacMillan’s publications include: Women of the Raj:The Mothers, Wives, and Daughters of the British Empire in India; The Uses and Abuses of History(based on the 2008 Joanne Goodman lecture series); The War that ended Peace: how Europe abandoned Peace for the First Word War; and History’s People: Personalities and the Past (based on the 2015 Massey Lectures).
Professor MacMillan recently delivered the 2018 Reith lectures series, originally broadcast on BBC Radio4 and now being broadcast on ABC Radio National “Big Ideas” program. You can listen to podcasts of the series here:
The lecture will be preceded by the launch of the Society’s new book – Mapping Van Diemen’s Land the Great Beyond.
GENEROUSLY SUPPORTS THE PRESENTATION OF THIS LECTURE
Five near extinguishments of life on Earth have been related to changes in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. Extra-terrestrial meteorites are often blamed, but Earth’s own forces may be suspect. Heat within the Earth builds volcanoes. Even small volcanic eruptions have local, regional and global climate effects. Giant lava fields coincide with the three most recent mass extinction events. Scaling up impacts from small eruptions to such voluminous eruptions indicates that volcanism is a major contributor to climatic disruption, with dire consequences for life.
Dr Karin Orth lectures in Earth Sciences at the University of Tasmania. After a primary degree at Monash University and working for the Victorian Geological Survey, she gained her PhD in Tasmania. She has worked on ancient volcanic rocks in various regions across Australia, most recently on a very large field of ancient volcanic rocks that stretch across the Kimberley of northern Western Australia.
TMAG Customs House, Hobart Tuesday 3 July @8 pm
All are welcome, free lecture.
In the past decade the field of astronomy has been building towards a revolution in the way we measure distances and other fundamental physical properties of the stars in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The rapid increase in detector sensitivity and computing power in the 21st century has enabled both ground-based and space-based astronomy missions to survey enormous areas of the sky with unprecedented precision in the astrophysical parameters.
Andrew will discuss some of the most significant recent developments to come out of this “big data” revolution, which range from improved knowledge of the frequency and masses of planets around nearby stars, the distribution of luminous and dark matter in the Milky Way, and the forensics of working out how the galaxy itself was assembled by infalling matter over billions of years.
Dr Andrew Cole is Associate Professor in Physics and Astronomy and the Director of the Greenhill Observatory, the home of UTAS optical astronomy research infrastructure. Dr Cole studies the processes and effects that govern the evolution of matter in the Universe from the Big Bang to the present day. Essentially, how things came to be from the beginning of time as we know it. Along with many who came before him and undoubtedly many to follow, he is driven by an innate curiosity, stubbornness and a sense of adventure. Dr Cole uses the UTAS 1.3-metre Harlingten telescope to search for exoplanets around stars in the direction towards the centre of the Mil
ky Way by analysis of gravitational microlensing light curves.
Tuesday Jun 5, 2018 @8 pm Royal Society Room, TMAG Hobart
Dr Klocker will talk about the 2016, 2017, and 2018 caving and cave diving expeditions he led to Sistema Huautla, one of the world’s deepest cave systems located in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. The goal of the expeditions is to connect Sistema Huautla with its outlet in the remote Santo Domingo Canyon about 10 kilometers from its entrance. The successful connection of Sistema Huautla with its outlet would result in the world’s deepest and most spectacular cave traverse.
Dr Klocker will focus in particular on the March 2018 expedition which promises to be one of the most ambitious and challenging cave diving projects ever attempted as the divers attempt to surpass the previous limit of exploration, some five kilometers underground, reached in 1984 when logistical challenges halted progress.
Dr Klocker, originally from Austria, completed a diploma in marine environmental science in Germany, and moved to Hobart to work as honorary research fellow at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC. He undertook a PhD as part of the UTAS-CSIRO joint PhD program in Quantitative Marine Science, followed by a postdoctoral position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked on ocean turbulence in the Southern Ocean. He returned to Australia as a Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Climate System Science and the Australian National University. Dr Klocker was then awarded an ARC DECRA Fellowship at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies continuing his specialist work on ocean turbulence.
Dr Klocker got hooked by caving in 2008 while doing his PhD, and soon after combined his caving and diving addiction to become a cave diver in 2011. In Australia his main focus has been on cave exploration in the Junee-Florentine in Tasmania, an area known for Australia’s deepest cave systems, remote sumps and huge exploration potential. In the last couple years he also turned his attention towards major cave systems in Mexico, in particular Sistema Huautla, where he enjoys the challenge of combining deep ‘dry’ caving and challenging cave diving in one of the world’s most amazing cave systems.
