Today's show will include guests from the Coral Reef Symposium's Educational Center. Gary Levine and Andy Hooten are expected to call-in. Others have been invited.Malcolm McCulloch of the Australian National University, Australia opened up the conference's Plenary Session with a presentation entitled Lessons from the Past.Professor Malcolm McCulloch grew-up in Western Australia where he received undergraduate training in the physical sciences. In 1980 he was awarded a PhD from the Division of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology and then returned to Australia to take-up a Research Fellowship at The Australian National University in the Research School of Earth Sciences.
At ANU he was responsible for establishing a new range of geochemical methods to better understand how the Earth's continental crust and mantle has grown and evolved. For the past decade his research interests have increasingly focussed on the modern part of the geologic record, using isotopic and trace element methods to determine how climate and anthropogenic processes have influenced both past and present environments, with particular emphasis on coral reefs.
Using geochemical proxies preserved in the long-lived (300 to 400 year old) coral skeletons from the Great Barrier Reef he has been able to show how European settlement and associated land-use practices has led to a five to ten fold increase in sediment and nutrient fluxes entering the reef relative to 'natural' levels. This has provided important quantitative evidence to support enhanced National-State protective measures. Using a similar geochemical isotope-based approach his group has also been able to show that the effects of rapidly increasing levels of anthropogenic CO2 are now becoming evident in living corals, reinforcing the concerns about the impact of ocean acidity on coral reef systems. He has also undertaken research on fossil coral reefs, in particular those from the Last Interglacial, where he has demonstrated the realities of an ~4 meter higher sea-levels associated with warmer sea surface temperatures, providing a benchmark for likely future increases. He an Associate Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef studies and has received a number of awards including Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science (2004), the American Geophysical Union (2002) and most recently the Geochemical Society (2008).