Macquarie University

Environmental Change - ENVE340

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 this evidence to understand how landscapes, vegetation, fauna and humans respond to large-scale climate and environmental change and use this as a baseline to comment on how they will respond to future changes. This unit considers how the environmental response from cave and fluvial sediment, tree rings, pollen, ice cores, marine cores and landforms can be used to reconstruct past environments to gain an understanding of how the earth system evolves. 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: the extent of glaciation in Kosciuszko; how environmental change in Africa and Asia shaped the evolution of early humans; human-environmental interactions such as the mega fauna debate; and how climatic change during the past hundred thousand years affected sediment transport and drainage systems in the Murray Darling basin.

Timetable Information

For unit timetable information and session dates for external offerings please visit the Timetables@Macquarie Website.