Macquarie University

Environmental Change - ENVS340

This unit requires you to piece together lines of evidence to reconstruct the climatic and environmental changes over the last 2.6 million years. This period saw dramatic changes as the environment swung in and out of huge glacials, where large sections of the planet were covered in ice, to interglacials, where the climate recovered and the environment flourished. We will use different lines of evidence such as cave and fluvial sediment, tree rings, pollen, ice cores, marine cores and landforms as proxies to reconstruct past environments, to establish a benchmark for environmental change and to define the normal range of variability. We can then use this benchmark as a context for present day changes to predict how the environment will change in the future and how landscapes, vegetation, fauna and humans will respond. This understanding is then related to evidence of environmental change seen in the local Australian landscape, and investigated during field excursions, including a week-long field trip during the mid-semester break. Case studies include: rapid environmental change in Indonesia; reconstructing the last glacial maximum in NSW; how environmental change in Africa and Asia shaped the evolution of early humans; human-environmental interactions in Australia such as the mega fauna debate; and how forest fires and deforestation have affected our present day climate.