Availability: This unit is available to external students only in second semester.

Residential School: 16 - 22 September.

Co-ordinator: Dr Robert G. Baker.

Online level: 0

Students who successfully complete this unit will:

· Appreciate how marine environments have changed over the past 20 000 years from field observations.
· Develop skills in recording evidence of change from marine species, geomorphology and human occupation;
· Learn to synthesise environmental information to recreate past environments and human interaction within these environments;
· Encourage group work in the gathering of information and its presentation;
· Understand the reasons at every scale for changes in marine environments over the past 20, 000 years and their relation to the present global warming debate.
· Produce a field report integrating and applying the unit reading to field examples.

Content: The unit will demonstrate, from field study, how coastal systems have evolved in Australia over the past 20 000 years as a result of global climatic change, and how human occupation has adapted to such changes. Past seal-level movements have left evidence in both rocky and depositional shorelines (coasts and estuaries). The unit will develop observational, recording and analytical skills about marine environmental change, and associated Aboriginal occupational remains. It is centred around a 7 day field school at Bundeena, Royal National Park, NSW.

Assessment is by Literature Review (1,500 words) (30%), Field Report (2,500 words) (40%) and 2 hour examination (30%).

Prescribed Text
Carter,R.W.G. and Woodruffe, C.O. Coastal Evolution: Late Quaternary Shoreline morphodynamics, Cambridge University Press.