Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
A century later, scientific attitudes towards the arid interior of Australia became
curiously polarised (Powell,
1988
; Powell,
1991
). The eminent geographer Griffith
Taylor argued with great eloquence that aridity would exercise a crucial control over
future settlement of the continent (Taylor,
1949
). His earlier maps showed much of
the interior labelled as 'useless', and he had predicted that by the turn of the twentieth
century, Australia would probably have a population of about 20 million people but
not more. His opponents ignored the fact that 70 per cent of the continent was arid or
semi-arid and in a burst of misguided optimism wrote in glowing terms of 'Australia
unlimited', with a forecast population of more than 100 million people by 2000
(Powell,
1993
; Flannery,
1994
). In any event, Taylor was remarkably accurate in his
forecast but was compelled by popular opinion to quit his adopted land for many
years.
In the years between the two world wars, geologists, soil scientists, hydrologists
and natural scientists made steady progress in mapping and describing the resources of
the Australian arid zone. After 1945, there was renewed impetus to map the geology,
geomorphology, soils and plant cover in the drier parts of inland Australia, both
by the different Divisions of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organisation (especially the Divisions of Soils and of Land Research and Regional
Survey, later combined into CSIRO Land and Water) and by the former Bureau of
Mineral Resources (now Geoscience Australia). There were also strong efforts by the
Australian Bureau of Meteorology to develop a comprehensive grid of meteorological
stations across the entire continent and to provide farmers and graziers with reliable
forecasts of extreme weather conditions. Considerable effort is presently devoted
to analysing regional rainfall and temperature trends and to using the now well-
established links between sea surface temperatures around Australia and floods and
droughts to predict such events in sufficient time for farmers to be able to act on the
information and plan ahead intelligently.
The sandy deserts attracted the attention of geologists and biologists and resulted
in early studies of the morphology, spacing and orientation of linear dunes in the
Simpson Desert and across the continent (Madigan,
1936
; Sprigg,
1959
; Jennings,
1968
; Mabbutt,
1968
;Twidale,
1972
; Sprigg,
1979
). These studies were pursued in
greater detail by later workers who sought to establish the age of the dunes and the
processes shaping dune development (Wasson,
1984
), an interest that persists to this
day (Fujioka et al.,
2009
; Hesse,
2010
) and which we consider in detail in
Chapter 8
.
Early studies of wind-blown dust pioneered by Butler and his colleagues in the former
CSIRO Soils Division (Butler,
1956
; Butler,
1974
; Butler,
1982
) were concerned with
the role of desert dust or loess in soil formation. These studies burgeoned ultimately
into joint research between earth scientists from China, led by the late Professor Liu
Tungsheng, and a team of Australians who were among the first foreign scientists
invited to visit China in 1975, after the isolation of earlier years (Wasson,
1982
). The
dust storms that irked Darwin have given rise to careful study, especially by McTainsh
