Tabla de contenidos para May - June 2020 en Australian Geographic

THE NEW DECADE has certainly made its presence felt, roaring in like a lion and sweeping away all semblance of normality. We embarked on the year battling bushfires of unparalleled ferocity and scale. Then, just as those affected communities began picking up the pieces, a global pandemic put paid to daily life as we know it. This new crisis is one we share with the rest of humanity. And as we go to press, it appears Australia may be dealing with it more effectively than other developed countries such as the USA and the UK. Whether that’s because we reacted more quickly and decisively, or that Aussies cooperated better to embrace mitigation measures, we can’t yet say. It will be for experts to assess such things in due course. Maybe…

The so-called Superman Barn, built in 2005 on a paddock south of Gunnedah in rural New South Wales as part of a film set for a Hollywood blockbuster, provides the perfect photographic foil for the flat landscape of the surrounding Liverpool Plains. The barn has remained long after the movie crew left, and when Luke Tscharke was granted permission by the site’s owners to photograph the stars here in 2017 he was treated to a stunning display of pre-sunrise zodiacal light. This early January image captures the Milky Way far from interfering light pollution and went on to take out the Photo Editor’s Choice in that year’s prestigious David Malin Awards for Astrophotography. (The flare seen in the sky near the top left of the image is caused by sunlight…

IN OCTOBER 1905, Australasian Ornithologists’ Union (AOU) members travelled to Adelaide from around the country for their fifth congress. The AOU’s mandate was “to collate and disseminate up-to-date information relating to the avifauna of Australasia and to secure protection to useful birds from ruthless destruction”. Unlike most scientific organisations of the day, women had been full members and active participants of the AOU since its inception. At the end of the conference, 22 bird lovers, including six women, headed via steamer to Kangaroo Island for 10 days to observe the local birdlife and natural environment. Rough weather delayed the group’s landing on Snelling Beach, on the island’s north coast, until the morning of 15 October, after which the party then made its way westwards with all its luggage and equipment…

Epidemic and pandemic As part of the normal ebb and flow of background infectious diseases, an epidemic will sometimes arise. An epidemic is an outbreak of an infectious disease, mostly confined to a local area. The word comes from the Greek epi meaning “upon”, and demos meaning “people”. Occasionally, an epidemic will break loose to spread across much of the world. This is called a “pandemic”, from pan meaning “all”. Why does this happen? Evolution? The answer can be found in the famous quote from the movie The Godfather: “It’s not personal; it’s just business.” We humans might think we’re the crowning achievement of evolution because we’ve invented literature, nuclear weapons and income tax. But evolution doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to be good enough. And sometimes…

AS COVID-19 spreads worldwide, humanity faces a crisis on a previously unimaginable scale. But, like many other recent outbreaks, this disease began as a virus in animals that jumped across to people. Data suggest, in fact, that about 70 per cent of novel infectious human diseases originated in other animals. A surprising number, including many of the deadliest – such as rabies, SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus), SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), Ebola, Marburg, Hendra and lyssavirus – appear to have come from bats. Some move directly from these flying mammals to people. Australian bat lyssavirus, for example, can spread to people from bat saliva, causing an often fatal rabies-like disease. Discovered in 1996, it is extremely rare: only three cases are known, all in Queensland. Many viruses, however, pass from bats to…

AT THE AGE OF 13, Matt Daum became “the man of the house” when his father passed away. He began maintaining his family’s lawn and, over the years, discovered he had a knack for keeping it healthy. Now in his 40s, Matt spends about three hours every weekend lovingly tending his lawn in Whyalla, South Australia, using an old-fashioned cylinder mower that “cuts like a pair of scissors”. He also runs a lawn appreciation page on Facebook. Matt started the page three years ago when he was forced to take time off from his job as a police officer following an injury. The page, named Lawnporn after a moniker Matt’s friends had given his lawn, very quickly gained traction. Matt posted lawn care tutorials and launched a lawn photo competition…

THIS ANCIENT eastern Australian feature perfectly demonstrates that geology is a dynamic and evolving field. The now widely accepted theory of plate tectonics (see right) only emerged in the late 1960s. About the same time, the concept of mantle plumes was also being formulated to explain volcanoes like those of the Cosgrove hotspot track, which occur in the middle of tectonic plates so could not have been caused by movement around their edges. The discovery by Associate Professor Rhodri Davies and his team that lithospheric thickness affects the size and composition of the volcanoes caused by mantle plumes won’t be the last revelation this track has for scientists. PLUME The mantle plume that caused the Cosgrove hotspot track is a cylinder of heated rock that wells up from the boundary…

The ability to precisely measure and calibrate things such as time, distance, weight, temperature and brightness has a surprisingly massive impact on our lives. Even seemingly trifling measurement errors can have dire consequences. Consider, for example, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter. This US$125 million robotic spacecraft burnt up as it attempted to enter the Red Planet’s orbit in 1999 because a stuff-up between its navigation software, which used metric units, and its altitude-control system, which used imperial units, placed it 100km closer to Mars than intended. In France in 2014 another measurement error meant that 2000 new trains, ordered at a cost of €15 billion, were too wide to fit alongside the platforms of many regional rail stations. As a result more than 1000 platforms had to be reconfigured, at vast…

THE FIRST OF January 2018 was a wake-up call for many Australians. For more than a decade we’d exported millions of tonnes of glass containers, drink cans, cardboard and other recyclable waste to Asia. But that was the day when China, one of the biggest recipients of our rubbish, said no more. The decision created a huge dilemma for many Australian councils. Domestic recycling facilities quickly became overwhelmed and recycling began to be stockpiled in warehouses or dumped into landfill, leaving many people disillusioned and wondering whether their careful sorting and collecting of waste had all been for nothing. So is recycling really just a massive waste of time? There’s certainly no guarantee that what you currently separate out will actually be recycled. But innovative new projects are looking at…

LOCAL GOVERNMENT waste services include kerbside collection, public place waste management and the provision of recycling and disposal infrastructure. Not all regions in Australia have access to all kerbside services as shown below. However, 95 per cent of households have access to garbage collection, 91 per cent to recycling services and 42 per cent to organics waste collections such as garden refuse. KERBSIDE recycling bins usually accept a mix of glass, metals, paper and plastic containers. This varies according to the processing capabilities at the local recovery facility. This figure (right) shows the average composition of a typical kerbside recycling service. Paper and cardboard make up the biggest percentage. This amount has fallen in recent years as newspaper circulation has declined. Contamination rates of recycling materials ranges between 4 and…

FOR DECADES scientists have known Earth has suffered bombardment from outer space; not by invading aliens, but chunks of solar system debris swept up by our planet as we orbit the Sun. These can be dust-sized meteors lighting up the night sky as shooting stars. Or, at the other end of the scale, are city-sized asteroids capable of initiating mass extinctions, such as the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Fortunately, we are now on guard against those rare catastrophes. Our planet’s scars from these events are impact craters such as Wolfe Creek Crater in Western Australia, recently dated at 120,000 years old. Such features are relatively short-lived due to the dynamic resurfacing of Earth by processes ranging from weather erosion to plate tectonics. Sometimes we…

MY EXPERIENCE of isolation has taken many forms over the years. There’s the loneliness of working for myself, of challenging environmental norms, of leadership, where you internalise questioning and self-doubt, and, of course, there’s the undertaking of expeditions to some of the world’s most remote and hostile regions. In 2007 I embarked on an expedition that would push me to my absolute physical and mental limit. Re-tracing Sir Douglas Mawson’s 500km solo trek across Antarctica, I was alone on the ice for a month. To compound things, I was surviving on a starvation diet and using 100-year-old clothing and equipment to re-create the conditions that Mawson had faced. Each day brought with it new challenges; extreme weather, cold, equipment failure, personal injury and navigational challenges, all compounded by the dangerous…

Society news Last November’s sponsorship grants and the Nancy-Bird Walton award have been finalised. Here are just a few of the projects we’re supporting throughout the year. Some are underway already, but others will take place once the COVID-19 restrictions are lifted. NANCY-BIRD WALTON AWARD The Australian Geographic Society has awarded Sophie Matterson the 2020 Nancy-Bird Walton $5000 sponsorship for female adventurers for her project Coast to the Coast, a 5000km camel journey across Australia. Sophie has spent four years learning everything she can about camels and how to train the beasts of burden, spending time in Australia, the USA and India to do so. In January last year, she mustered five wild camels from the Northern Territory and has since been training them to carry her and her supplies…

JELLYFISH USED TO DRIFT under most people’s radars. But in recent years they’ve become hard to ignore, with reports of increasing jellyfish ‘swarms’ along coastlines and in harbours. These events are more accurately known as jellyfish blooms and are a natural stage in the population life cycles of these mysterious, diaphanous creatures that invoke both revulsion and fascination. But there’s concern about the increasing frequency and size of such events, with some blooms thought to be indicators of ecological disturbance caused by anthropogenic factors such as pollution and overfishing. Leading international jellyfish researcher Dr Kylie Pitt, a professor in marine ecology at the school of Environment and Science at Griffith University, Queensland, has, for the past decade, been investigating reasons for these explosions of gelatinous marine life. Most recently she…

LUMINOUS INTENSITY The candela (cd) The brightness of a source that emits monochromatic green light, one candela has a radiant intensity of 1/683 watts per steradian (W/sr). MASS The kilogram (kg) Defined in terms of the Planck constant, h, the kilogram is expressed in energy and time. LENGTH The metre (m) Defined by the speed of light, a metre is the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. TIME The second (s) A second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the hyperfine transition frequency of a caesium-133 atom. ELECTRIC CURRENT The ampere (A) An ampere relates to the elementary charge, e, the electric charge carried by a single electron. And e has a fixed value of 1.602176634 x 10–19 coulomb.…

IN THE AGE of digital disruption, with artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G data, new applications for the waste industry are taking hold with potential to fundamentally change how we manage waste. Smart bins with IoT-enabled sensors that communicate how full they are have emerged in recent years as a solution to inefficient waste collection methods. This means that a truck isn’t sent to collect half-empty bins, and bins can be emptied before they overflow. Smart City Solutions is an Australianbased provider of high-tech smart bins with so far more than 1200 deployed nationwide. Its flagship product is a solar-powered compacting waste bin that automatically compacts rubbish as needed and has eight times the capacity of a standard bin. When it’s full, it notifies the client that…

Descending 30m to the base of Steve’s Bommie, just as the morning sun breaks the horizon, I’m filled with trepidation about whether this undersea setting is still a splendid visual palette of colour and life. It’s been two decades since I last visited this celebrated dive site on Ribbon No. 3 Reef, east of Cooktown, on the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). During that time this World Heritage-listed natural wonder has suffered a series of environmental threats, ranging from over-fishing to agricultural run-off. Many of these are now better managed. But the reef continues to face its biggest threat by far – climate change. Well beyond the realm of local management, this global phenomenon has caused four major coral bleaching episodes since 1988, killing huge swathes of…

• Member of the Commonwealth • Second largest island in the world • Independence in 1975 • Under Australian administration from 1906 to 1975 • Population: 7,259,456 • Languages: Tok Pisin (official), English (official), Hiri Motu (official), with some 839 indigenous languages spoken. • Religions: Protestant 64.3 percent, Roman Catholic 26 percent, other Christian 5.3 percent, non-Christian 1.4 percent, unspecified 3.1 percent (2011 est.) • Head of state: HM Queen Elizabeth II • Currency: Kina…

MAILBAG WELCOMES FEEDBACK Send letters, including an address and phone number, to editorial@ ausgeo.com.au or to Australian Geographic, GPO Box 4088, Sydney NSW 2001. Letters will be edited for length and clarity. Featured Letter INSPIRED BY FIRE There’s a roaring in the valley like a steam train bearing down, as it flies across the treetops and licks along the crown. Like fireworks exploding, the canopy’s aflame. It’s racing now towards us as the forest cries in pain. The creatures they are running and the birds are flying by as the smoke gets to choking us and filling up the sky. We are trained and we are willing and we really have good gear, but our guts are churning over as we fight back at our fear. Now at the front…

There were anxious days in early January when it looked as if the Black Summer fires had caused Australia’s 28th mammal extinction – that the flames had forced the Kangaroo Island dunnart over the brink. Weighing less than 25g when fully grown and with a diet of mostly insects, the dunnart is like a tiny quoll. It lives only on Kangaroo Island (KI) in South Australia and by mid-January it was known that it had lost more than 95 per cent of its habitat to fire. Most of that was in Flinders Chase National Park, in KI’s west, which was almost completely burnt at the beginning of the year. There were, however, eight sites on private property where conservation organisation Kangaroo Island Land for Wildlife (KILfW) had been monitoring small…

A SINGLE GIANT SPIDER CRAB can be hard to see. It barely exceeds 15cm across, despite its common name, and its triangular upper shell is covered in spines, hairs and knobs that make it blend into an ocean floor background. It will even make itself more inconspicuous by placing living sponges, hydroids and algae onto its shell from the surrounding temperate reef environment where it lives. But when this species comes together en masse, in aggregations that can exceed 50,000 individuals, it’s difficult to miss. Spider crabs converge like this at several locations around Australia – including in South Australia and Tasmania – but no aggregation is as predictable or easily accessible as that in Port Phillip Bay. The timing of this great assembly usually occurs between late May and…

THE CORAL SEA is serene today. Palm trees cast flickering shadows over a golden beach as a family makes its way across a tidal causeway towards a rocky island, fishing rods and buckets in hand. Behind them, on the mainland, hills clad in hoop pine forests roll towards the shore, their green expanse interspersed with occasional bare, jutting outcrops. On the island’s ocean side, sunlight glints off crystals embedded in black and red rocks. This is Wedge Island, off Cape Hillsborough in Queensland, and the bay here is evidence of an ancient volcano that formed some 34 million years ago. It marks the northernmost point of the Cosgrove hotspot track, a chain of extinct volcanoes that extends southwards across eastern Australia through Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, to the…

THE SKY WAS PITCH BLACK as the giant Currowan fire roared over Mt Scanzi and down the hill to Tallowa Dam, on the western fringes of Kangaroo Valley, about 180km south-west of Sydney. It was Saturday 4 January. The fire had already jumped the Shoalhaven River and thundered along the Bugong Fire Trail, destroying properties in its path. It had generated an enormous pyrocumulonimbus cloud that loomed above, and as it tore across the landscape it sent bright red embers flying. At about 6pm Alison Baker and Paul Williams, owners of Banksia Park Cottages, an accommodation property overlooking Lake Yarrunga, received text messages from the local Rural Fire Service (RFS) warning they had only 40 minutes to leave. Knowing they were in the fire’s path, Alison and Paul had already decided…

A MUDDY plume expands across Morobe Harbour as our shimmering white ship, Coral Adventurer, sails into the bay just after dawn on a Sunday morning in mid-November. The recent late onset of monsoonal rains has brought a long dry period to an abrupt end. Since then an incessant heavy downpour has transformed local rivers into powerful deluges that barrel down from the highlands, eroding riverbanks, inundating floodplains and sweeping mud, timber and other debris into the bay and out into the great wide Solomon Sea beyond. An occasional sharp mountain peak pierces the lowslung, rain-laden clouds, hinting at the steep, rainforested range providing a lush backdrop to the traditional beach village of Mou, where a small community eagerly awaits us. The ship’s tender, Explorer 1, whisks us from the ship…

Come on an adventure with us while raising funds for the AG Society at the same time. Please check directly with the individual operators on the status of these experiences. At the time of press they are going ahead but things may change as a result of COVID-19. A new era of Great Barrier Reef (GBR) expeditions has arrived with Coral Expeditions’ all-new seven-night voyages. Journey beyond the known and to the outer edge of the GBR to discover abundant marine life, ancient cultures, seabirds and solitude amid this iconic seascape. Travelling aboard our yacht-like vessel, Coral Discoverer, with no more than 72 fellow travellers, you will be led by our expert guides, meet new friends and enjoy the GBR like few have. WHO: Coral Expeditions DATES: 7 nights |…

Green tree frog AG 15 July–September 1989 FOR THE FRONT cover of each of the first 83 editions of Australian Geographic, from January 1986 to July 2006, we commissioned an original native wildlife illustration. These artworks were always in a photorealistic style and AG engaged the talents of a small group of Australian artists who specialised in that form of creative expression. The covers were a defining feature of AG for more than two decades. Foremost among those artists was South Australian Kevin Stead. His green tree frog on the cover of the July-September 1989 issue supported a story by herpetologist Mike Tyler – Australia’s ‘Frog Man’. Of all the painted covers, this frog caused the biggest stir among our readers, many of whom found it hard to believe it…