Postgraduate Opportunities
Research projects currently available to undertake are outlined below. For further information on any of them please contact the relevant research academic associated with the project. This interdisciplinary project will primarily use small shelly fossils to determine the ages of key lower Cambrian successions in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia. Build your palaeontological knowledge of early Cambrian fossil fauna and their biostratigraphic applications, and complement this work with stable isotope chemostratigraphy and lithologic data. This is a great opportunity to contribute to building the geological timescale, and regionally and globally correlate rocks from South Australia during the Cambrian Explosion of life. Skills acquired via this project are widely used in both academia and industry. To find out more about this project please contact Dr Marissa Betts. Use cutting-edge 3D scanning technologies to reconstruct the oldest complex skeletons in the fossil record and resolve the functional morphology, palaeoecology and evolutionary relationships of the enigmatic animals who made them. To find out more about this project please contact Dr Marissa Betts. This project aims to reconstruct the kinds of ancient marine environments in which early animals evolved and diversified. This includes the world's oldest animal-built reefs and the palaeoenvironments that flanked them. This work is key for understanding the interplay between ancient marine environments and the evolution of early animals. This multi-faceted project will also incorporate investigation of how fossils are preserved in carbonates, and the effects preservation style has on fossil recovery and ecosystem reconstructions. To find out more about this project please contact Dr Marissa Betts. In the Flinders Ranges, the Billy Creek Formation contains a series of (up to 12) individual volcanic ash deposits interleaved within fossiliferous siliciclastics. This is a very exciting interdisciplinary project that incorporates regional chronostratigraphic development with volcanology (quantifying eruption style and duration), tectonics (assembly of Gondwana) and palaeontology (early Cambrian trilobites). To find out more about this project please contact Dr Marissa Betts or Dr Luke Milan. The project would entail characterising a vast, poorly understood rhyolitic volcanic field in terms of its evolution over time and overall eruptive style. The occurrence of such extensive volcanic fields provides an opportunity to explore over-arching geological processes important for the petrogenesis and tempo of silicic volcanism. The project would have a strong field component and would entail building a compilation of a variety of data-sources, including historic data. Integral to unravelling the evolution of these rocks would be extensive petrology, bulk-rock and mineral geochemistry, and U-Pb geochronology using a series of techniques. There is significant scope to diversify the project including investigating relationships of these volcanic rocks to temporally and spatially related granites. This could lead into investigating the controlling factors on the fate of rhyolitic melts and what are the triggers for large eruptions. These methods will be employed in combination to understand the entire evolution of the region. This project is based in the beautiful New England Region of NSW. To find out more about this project please contact Dr Luke Milan or Dr Tim Chapman. This project is focussed on a serpentinite belt hosting lower to upper crustal rocks, and dismembered blocks of ophiolitic affinity that up until recently were thought to be Cambrian in age. A recent publication from our laboratory indicates that large fragments of intact ophiolitic material are early Permian in age. Little is known of the early Permian ophiolite and this project would focus on characterising a variety of ophiolitic blocks to unravel the tectonic history spanning to the Cambrian. There are opportunities to explore igneous and tectonic processes for the formation of the oceanic lithosphere including mineralisation of chromite. The project would entail field mapping, petrology, whole rock geochemistry, mineral geochemistry, geochronology and isotope geochemistry. This project is based in the beautiful New England Region of NSW. There is significant scope to diversify the research project, depending on the candidate. To find out more about this project please contact Dr Luke Milan or Dr Tim Chapman. This research project will explore whether the monazite ages with a 30 Myr spread in single areas in Himalaya Orogen reflect multiple metamorphic events or the role of partial isotopic resetting, using rocks samples with variable metamorphic grades in eastern and central Himalayas. Detailed analysis on internal structure and crystalline features of grains with scanning electron microscope (SEM) and transmission electron microscope (TEM) as well as major and trace element analysis with Electron Microprobe (EMP), will be linked to micro-dating of monazite for a correct interpretation of monazite ages. In partially molten rocks such as migmatite, zircon U-Pb dating will also be employed for double insurance since zircon is more resistant to being altered and reset on isotopic composition. The project would also involve phase equilibria calculations on representative samples to resolve P-T-t paths. To find out more about this project please contact Dr Luke Milan or Dr Tim Chapman.
