Our Future and the Earth's Past - Learning from holes in the ocean bottom

How does Earth’s climate system work? How were the continents made? What causes volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis?

The answers are all to be found at the bottom of the ocean. Join Geoscientist Bob Musgrave on a two-month adventure on a scientific drilling ship – but from the comfort of the Newcastle Museum McIntyre Lecture Theatre, at 6pm on Wednesday 16th August 2023!

Bob Musgrave’s peripatetic career in geophysics took him from palaeomagnetic studies of plate motion in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Zealand, to studies of solid methane ice (“gas hydrate”), and the bacteria that “eat’ it, in cores of deep marine sediments with the International Ocean Drilling Program, to a decade or more of teaching geophysics and geology at La Trobe University, and finally to 16 years of puzzling over the geology of eastern Australia with the Geological Survey of NSW.

Now in post-redundancy semi-retirement, he continues to operate a palaeomagnetic laboratory at the University of Newcastle, when he is not being called back to do urgent contract work for the people who thought him redundant, but now seem to miss his talents.

Bob graduated with his PhD in geology and geophysics from the University of Sydney in 1987. His PhD, and postdoctoral research at Victoria University of Wellington, the Australian National University, and the University of Tasmania, applied palaeomagnetism to the tectonics of the southwest Pacific.

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Proudly sponsored by the Hunter Valley Branch of Geological Society Australia 

Presented by Hunter Innovation & Science Hub