NEWS LETTER
May 2025
For bookings:
phone: (03) 9347 3428
email: membership@graduatehouse.com.au website: www.graduatehouse.com.au
May Luncheon
Wednesday, 7th May
About
Luncheons at Graduate House include welcome drinks, a two course meal with wine and tea and cofffee.
June Luncheon
Wednesday, 4th June
About
Carmel Shute
Why women turn to crime (fiction)
Time: 12:00pm for 12:30pm start Online log in: 1:10 pm for 1:15pm start
*Luncheons at Graduate House include welcome drinks, a two course meal with wine and tea and coffee
April Luncheon
Dr. Vera Korasidis: “A paleontological perspective on rapid climate change”
On Wednesday, 2nd April, Dr. Vera Korasidis delivered a memorable Graduate House Monthly Luncheon. Dr. Korasidis is a Lecturer and DECRA Fellow at The University of Melbourne and a Research Associate at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. This follows a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution and a PhD at The University of Melbourne.
Good afternoon everyone and thank you for being here to learn all about how we can use palaeontology to provide new insights into rapid climate change. So today I’m going to focus on two related disciplines, both geoscience and also biology. And the reason I’m going to do so is because we can take the insights provided by looking at rocks and also the fossils within them into how life will either perish or adapt in the face of climate change. I’m really interested in understanding how life responds to changes in climate, and I do so using fossil plants. Plants are a wonderful paleo-climate archive, and when I say plant I’m talking about leaves, charcoal (burnt plants), fossil cuticles (the outermost layer of a plant) and fossil pollen (the reproductive portions of plants).
I’m really interested in how ecosystems have changed both through time and across landscapes. The earth’s around four and a half billion years old but plants are a relatively new addition. They evolved around 400 million years ago or so, so we study rocks, of course, that formed in the last 400 million years of Earth’s history as well. But I’m also really interested in understanding how landscapes at the same time, but millions of years ago,
changed.
To begin, we’re actually going to talk about a really interesting record and that’s the record of fire on Earth. As climate scientists and geologists such as myself, we’re really interested in trying to understand how the history of fire on Earth has changed through time. And one really powerful archive of that is charcoal. I’d just like us to all think for a minute about, well, how do you actually get charcoal in a rock to begin with? So in order for that to happen, you obviously need to have plants and vegetation growing. And then after a fire has swept through, you’ve got bits of charcoal.
They must have been incorporated into a body of water, because in order for any fossil to actually get preserved, it needs to be buried in water. That’s why when we go for a walk on the street outside, there aren’t lots of dead leaves or insects on the sidewalk, they will be oxidised or degraded. But if there’s a pool of water available, the fossils can settle at the bottom and get preserved, and that’s how we find charcoal and leaves
and all these fossils. So now we’re going to talk about coal and I think we can all agree coal gets a pretty bad rap in general. We know burning it led to an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However, from a fossil perspective, coal is a wonderful archive of fossil plants. So what some of my earlier research was able to demonstrate is that coals are actually incredibly heterogeneous, and in fact you only get charcoal in a few select layers within the coal seams.
I was really interested in trying to understand where there is a good place in deep time to look for charcoal and how can we use that to understand fire history through time? And what we were able to determine based on looking at the fossil pollen and spores and leaves is that these are the types of environments that likely produced those charcoal rich layers in the coal swamps 20 million years ago. And what’s even more exciting is if you would like to go for a walk in a forest that used to be right here in Victoria 20 million years ago, you just have to hop on a plane and head to New Zealand because that’s where all these plants continue to live today.
In some of my earlier research, which was in understanding changes across the landscape at one time, we were able to determine you get very different vegetation communities growing in different parts in these ancient domed swamp ecosystems and in particular you have this fire pouring vegetation just on the margins of these huge swamps. And this is really important for helping us understand
Charcoal in the Fossil Record
controls and understanding fire evolution through time because 20 million years ago, Australia was covered in rainforest. It wasn’t like today with lots of eucalyptus and fire sweeping through, however, this fire prone vegetation existing in the landscape, even just in small portions 20 million years ago, laid the foundation for Australia’s modern flora. So it is very important to understand the history of the plants that are dominating the landscape today.
Going forward, I’m really interested in actually undertaking some really novel experiments at the fire laboratory, which is located on Melbourne’s Creswick campus and now we have an almost entire warehouse filled with equipment that will allow us to light things on fire and make inferences. So what we’re doing with one of my PhD students is we’re actually going to be lighting some vegetation on fire at different intensities and then looking at its optical properties to try to come up with a way to infer temperature back millions and millions of years ago, the temperature of fires back through time.
And we’re also really interested in understanding the frequency of fire through deep time. So, watch this space!
Now we’re going to focus on climate change over the last 65,000,000 years. For most of the last 50 or so million years, the temperature on Earth has been considerably warmer than it is today. So I’m really interested in studying this particular period here, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM to really try to give us an insight into what will the earth look like if temperatures rise 8 to 12° and we can do this because it’s been warmer in the past. So how does the temperature increase of today compare to the PETM, which is the most rapid geological warming event that we know of in the geological record? We have a really, really sharp peak potentially, and these are where we may end up heading again depending on the emissions, but the PETM, even though it was geologically very rapid, is actually an order of magnitude slower than what’s happening today. We think it took 5000 years, back 56,000,000 years ago for the Earth’s temperature to increase 5 to 7°, whereas we could potentially do that much much quicker, but regardless it’s still a really interesting analogue to test for a similar pattern.
We think that the increase in temperature that occurred during the PETM was associated with an increase in carbon dioxide and that carbon dioxide came from volcanoes. So there’s lots of evidence from the North Atlantic that you have lots of volcanic activity
Melbourne University Creswick
56,000,000 years ago. All that volcanic activity ended up producing lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It also released methane clathrates. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. You have all this methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warming it up but it lasted around 100,000 years. This period of elevated temperature and CO2, and you can actually physically see where it started when you look at rocks. For example in a core from the bottom of the ocean, you can actually see where the PETM starts. It’s a kind of orange colour and that’s because the ocean became temporarily acidic and actually dissolved out all the shells which are making the rocks nice and white. So you can physically see where this event occurred.
So one of the things palaeontologists noticed is that a lot of changes were happening on land during this previous interval, 56,000,000 years ago when the temperatures were 5 or 6° warmer. Something really interesting that they noticed was that all the mammals became smaller. Teeth from primitive horses for that 100,000 year interval became smaller, which suggests the size of the animals also became smaller. They also noticed you had all this intercontinental migration because there was no ice at the poles. Animals were migrating across continents and also what’s interesting is you get hungry insects. So all of a sudden when you crack open rocks and find leaves, there’s all these bite marks in it so we know lots of things are happening to the animals and the insects.
During this period of elevated temperature
and CO2, I was really interested in what the plants were doing and you can investigate this by studying those periscopic fossil spores and pollen, and that’s what we did. So here I’ve just assimilated all the records from across the world of where people have got rock dissolved out of the pollen to try to understand and track what happened to plants during this interval. And the way I’m going to talk about this with you is to take a Biome approach. Each Biome is based on temperature, precipitation and seasonality at one place in time. So in Melbourne we’re in green, we’re in the temperate zone, but up in Queensland it’s probably a little bit more tropical, especially very far North Australia. There’s five main biomes there. We’ve got tropical in blue, arid in orange, temperate in green, purple in cold and polar climates. Effectively what we’ve done here is collaborated with some climate modellers who used modern climate modelling, which they used to predict the weather, and we put in inputs of what we thought the earth was like 60 million years ago to come up with a map of what the Earth looked like in that Biome space. The map showed no ice in Antarctica - that’s pretty interesting - instead you’ve got temperate forests. Australia was actually pretty similar. This is around 60 million years ago when the CO2 was around 680 parts per million. Today it’s about 20. Then during PETM, things shifted.
During this rapid warming event there’s an expansion of these tropical and temperate conditions and a contraction in the polar.
When the PETM happened, all the plants were growing in the tropics. Both the pollen and the climate modelling is telling us the same thing, that in the past when CO2 increased, you have this expansion of tropical and temperate. So, for example in Melbourne, it would be like suddenly having the plants that are growing in northern NSW or Queensland just hanging out here for 100,000 years and then they disappear again. So it’s just this migration of plants. So we tend to think of plants as quite stationary, but actually they and their distributions changed quite a lot. So now we’ve focused on the global picture let’s now hone in and try to understand at a local scale what’s happening to the plant in order. To do this, we’re going to head all the way over to Wyoming in the US, where I was able to spend the last four or five summers.
This is part of the research I completed while I was a postdoc at the Smithsonian Institute. So while there, I headed out into the field with colleagues to, you know, collect new samples. It really is just a spectacular part of the world,
a wonderful place to complete field work. It’s generally a pretty safe place to go. The one exception being the occasional spotting of a Mountain Lion, which I remember mum and dad were very excited to hear about. So it’s always a bit exciting heading out into the field and collecting. But the reason we were there is to better understand how plants in particular responded to this PETM event. The one thing I want you to take away is during the PETM my colleagues who study fossil plants notice you get all these tropical floors, just temporarily in Wyoming and then they disappear again. So my job was to come along and really try to understand what was going on with the pollen record, the microscopic plant record, because the same trend wasn’t being observed. And so we couldn’t figure out, the plants producing the leaves are also producing the pollen. Why would you have two completely different records? It just didn’t make sense. So we came up with two hypotheses to explain that discrepancy between the pollen and the floral record. One was that you had plants growing in the mountains surrounding the region. And that they were able to produce pollen and that pollen that was growing from plants at the top of the mountain, which is obviously a few degrees cooler, were then being transported down. So you got this kind of mixed assemblage. And then the other option was that we were getting reworking. Like I mentioned at the start of the talk, you can get fossils preserved in bodies of water, but if that body of water, once it forms rock then can
Vera in Wyoming
actually be eroded when a river or something cuts through it and all the fossils that were in that old rock are then reincorporated. So this is our reworking where you’re actually getting all the fossils mixed with them, so we wanted to investigate this in a little bit more detail.
So in order to do this, obviously we went out into the field, collected pollen which was our process and then as I was looking down the microscope started to notice some really interesting things, like what palm pollen looks like and what walnut pollen looks like. And the one thing I noticed was that during the Paleocene, so before this event, all the grains were really beautifully preserved. But then during the PETM, all of a sudden the walnut pollen didn’t look so nice. It was darker, corroded, broken. So I thought that’s pretty interesting. And then with the palm, however, it was consistently beautifully preserved. So this kind of started to suggest to me that potentially we’re getting reworking occurring where you’re getting all the bits of pollen that actually weren’t growing during this high CO2 time being broken up and reincorporated. So in order to investigate this I’ve actually used the chemistry of the pollen. So during COVID I drove from Washington DC up to the University of Maryland. I spent some time in David Nelson’s lab, where I actually picked individual pollen grains using a micro manipulator so that we could actually eventually analyse them to determine what their chemistry was like. Because remember,
during the PETM we had all that volcanic activity. When volcanoes are emitting CO2 the CO2 or the carbon itself is isotopically light. It just means it has a very distinct signature that should therefore be picked up in plants as they’re photosynthesising. So if the plants were growing during this high CO2 phase caused by this volcanic activity, they should have a different chemical signature than plants growing before or after. And that’s what I was just trying to prove. So despite the time consuming process, the results were certainly worth the effort because I was able to actually demonstrate exactly that chemically. So what I was able to demonstrate is that even though I found walnut in the PETM, it looked the same as the walnut from beforehand, so it clearly wasn’t growing in an environment that was associated with that big increase in carbon dioxide. But the palm was. So this is really exciting.
We were able to confirm that actually the reason why the previous paleontological work that was based on those spores and fronds wasn’t able to pick up a change in
Pollen Fossil
the plant was because they were looking at both older than the PTEM and PTEM at the same time. So now we can split them apart, which then means we can make some inferences about what the plants are doing now. Everyone in the audience just took my word for it that the main control on the chemistry of pollen is the atmosphere, but no one actually demonstrated that before. So thanks to some of our faculty funding a couple of years ago I visited the Smithsonian Environmental Research Centre and Penn State to actually sample from these Ginko Trees that they’re growing in chambers under different levels of CO2 to actually determine this for the first time, and I’m happy to report the main control on the chemistry of pollen is for isotopic or the chemistry of the air. So this is actually a really important finding going forward in the field because we’re potentially able to have a new way of determining what the chemistry of the atmosphere was like, millions and millions of years ago, so this is very exciting.
But before I get carried away by that, let’s go back to the PETM and this is actually what my results showed. So beforehand, Wyoming used to look like the swamps of Georgia or Florida; it was warm, wet, temperate with lots of crocodiles. Then during the PETM for that 100,000 year interval everything changed and instead you have this seasonally dry tropical climate with plants, like in Mexico for instance. So you have this tropical plant in an open forest and then it went back to what it was before, almost as if it didn’t happen.
So you might be wondering as I was, well, where did all these dry tropical plants that temporarily appear in Wyoming come from? They didn’t just evolve. They must have come from somewhere. So what I did back in 2023 was actually describe some of the new species I found, and I sent it out to my industry contacts who were working in the Gulf of Mexico. They were able to confirm that they’d seen those same pollen types actually in their rocks from slightly older.
So what this is suggesting is that during the PETM you had these plants beforehand, they were growing in the Gulf of Mexico. Then they migrated up the continent, lived there for 100,000 years and then retreated back. That kind of confirms what I was saying earlier with the climate modelling, we’re just getting more and more evidence to try to understand how far plants travel when the temperature increases. This is important for us to know with things like assisted migration of plants. It’s very important to understand how far plants are actually able to travel during these climate perturbations.
As far as picking individual pollen grains is,
I think there’s a better way, and one of the really wonderful things about pollen is that it actually auto fluoresces, meaning that in UV light you can see it. So I’ve actually recently started collaborating with some colleagues here at Melbourne, with the cytometry platform, to use flow cytometry to actually isolate and pick the pollen for me. So hopefully we can automate this approach, and we have done some preliminary testing which is very positive to actually then sort the pollen. So that should then save me a lot of time, which is good. So for the last little bit of our talk, we’re going to go back even further back in time. And now we’re going to look at how the Earth’s climate has changed over the last half a billion years. So we were just talking about the temperature peak 450 million years ago, but now we’re going to jump back and talk about an even earlier peak known as the Cretaceous. In the Cretaceous, the world was very, very different to today, from the distribution of land masses, Australia was actually still attached to Antarctica. We had this huge inland sea and this is where a lot of the opals that people find in Australia
come. Obviously, we were located much closer to the Poles, no ice present that we know of. So what was happening in Victoria at the time? Well, thanks to obviously some very enigmatic creatures, including some dinosaurs, palaeontologists have been really fascinated with this early Cretaceous period in Victoria’s history, it’s had lots of really interesting discoveries. Most recently some feathers which were once attributed to birds, were found to be most likely dinosaur feathers. These dinosaurs are wonderful, right? But what were the plants doing? What was the climate like at this time? So in order to investigate this again, here we go back to our trusty spores and pollen where we’re able then to match these spores and pollen to specific plants today and use the distribution of those plants today to infer something about the past climate and environment. So to help you see what I see when I’m looking down the microscope, counting all these balls and pollen and seeing the trees pop up in my mind, we recently commissioned some artwork to help bring to life what we think Victoria looked like around 120 million
years ago. This is unpublished, which is very exciting, but this is effectively what we think Victoria, and in particular Gippsland look like 120 million years ago. So you’ve got this understory of ferns, a beautiful canopy of conifers, in particular, Ginko. You’ve got some Marcaria, but there’s something very important missing from this picture. Would anyone like to hazard a guess, or can anyone tell me what major group of plants is not present in Victoria 120 million years ago? Flowers. So this is something that’s really
fascinated a lot of archaeologists and palaeontologists. Where did the first flowers come from? And even really fascinated Darwin, who referred to them as this abominable mystery. Where did they come from? They appeared to have come out of nowhere. One of the things that our data demonstrates is that during the Early Cretaceous, it’s getting consistently warmer and we think this increase in temperature really helps fuel the spread and diversification of flowering plants even at very, very high latitudes. Because remember Australia at the time was located at, you know, 80° S of the equator, so we
think that the increase in temperature really helped. This to me is really really interesting and exciting. It really is just trying to help us really understand how changing climates on Earth impacts the evolution of life and flowering plants today make up the bulk of all plants on the planet, they are incredibly important. But why should someone like me keep studying things that happened tens of millions of years ago, why does it matter?
Well, I think it matters because massive releases of carbon in the past did make the planet produce heat. There is no doubt about that. The other thing that happened in the past when we had this increase in temperature associated with an increase of carbon dioxide is you did have plants temporarily lost from regions that’s important to be aware of, especially in the agriculture industry. However, most vegetation communities are actually incredibly resilient to change, if you can prevent extinction occurring. So if we can provide cooler refuge for them to go into, they’re actually able to survive and then recolonize. So plants are resilient, but we do need to act now and to do our best to kind of preserve high diversity. www
The oldest flowering plant, Montsechia vidalii
Graduate House Garden Party
On Sunday 13th of April, Graduate House members enjoyed a lovely afternoon at Lady Josie Blyton’s house for the Graduate House Garden Party.
Attendants gathered to enjoy a cup of tea and lively conversation among members of council, Union members and residents of Graduate House, making the most of one of the last days of summer weather in Melbourne.
Our gracious host offered a marvelous time for everyone and at Graduate House we extend our gratitude for her generous invitation and hope to organise similar instances in the future.
The Women’s Forum: Democracy in Crisis Worldwide
The Women’s Forum met on the 19 of March 2025, the topic for discussion this month centred around the idea of democracy and the various ways democracy is understood and practiced in different parts of the world. We began by exploring the definition of “democracy,” starting with the dictionary definition of “rule by the people”.
We examined the behaviour of various “democracies” worldwide and concluded that countries that self-identify as democracies differ significantly in their election processes. Additionally, some democracies, such as Australia, have compulsory voting, while others do not. We noted that some countries that use the word “democratic” in their title are, in fact, not democracies at all. This includes North Korea and many countries in Africa.
Of course, we observed that even well-established democracies can deviate significantly from their stated aims, depending on their leaders, with the USA being a current example of this.
Our discussion was very stimulating and prompted us to think deeply about the role of individuals in maintaining their respective countries’ systems of government. We expressed our appreciation for Australia’s compulsory voting system, and most of us agreed that it was a very good idea. It also helps us to begin thinking about our next topic for discussion, which is “What happens when political parties appear to change policies for an election?” This will be held on Wednesday, 16 April 2025, beginning at 10 am at Graduate House.
Written by Maxine Cooper and Elizabeth Carvosso.
Events of interest at The University of Melbourne
TACTiLE / Monday 28 April, 1:10 - 2:00pm at Melba Hall (117), Conservatorium of Music (141)
Join the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music Saxophone Ensemble for TACTiLE! The ensemble features the Conservatorium saxophone studio and includes every voice in the saxophone family, from sopranino all the way to bass.
The Future of Disinformation / Wednesday 30 April, 5:00 - 7:00pm at Melbourne Connect: 700 Swanston Street, Carlton
The Future of Disinformation is an insightful exploration of how societies worldwide are increasingly subjected to misinformation and disinformation—spanning from social media to mainstream news.
Back to the Old Haunts – Photography and sound installation / From Tuesday 6 to Thursday 8 of May, 11:00am to 3:00pm at MPavilion Parkville (on University Square across Graduate House)
Historian and performer Alice Garner’s archival research has unearthed oral histories and photographs that capture life on university campus. In Back to the Old Haunts, the voices of past University of Melbourne students return to their old stomping grounds. For more information and bookings for these events please go to events.unimelb.edu.au
Upcoming dates and topics of the Women’s Forum at Graduate House:
Wednesday 21 May - Why is civics not being taught much in the current school system?
Wednesday 18 June - Political and economic interference in the Arts in Australia.
Wednesday 16 July - Elder discrimination.
Wednesday 20 August - Politics of healthcare.
McGill Faculty Club and Conference Centre
About visiting other clubs
Each reciprocal club is a unique reflection of the university or community it serves. The facilities and services available, as well as hours of operation, are quite different in each club. To ensure an enjoyable visit to another club, it is important to contact ahead whenever possible to find out when the club is open, and what services are offered to a visiting member.
Individual clubs may have restrictions in the use of their facilities, or in the frequency of visits, which should be respected. Please check with the club’s membership associate regarding reciprocal privileges at another club.
A letter of introduction, which we can email to you, is necessary to visit the reciprocal clubs, for this please contact membership@graduatehouse.com.au
About McGill Faculty Club and Conference Centre
McGill University, founded in 1821, is a renowned English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
The Faculty Club serves as the social centre for the University faculty and staff community. The Club provides a lounge, reading room, writing room, dining room,
Reading Room
Main entrance
bar facilities and hosts a series of special events throughout the year.
The mission of the McGill Faculty Club is to promote the intellectual and social life of the University community by providing a meeting place in an historical setting where club members and guests from different disciplines may enjoy the free exchange of ideas in a convivial atmosphere.
Private dining and meeting rooms are available to members and their friends for luncheons, dinners, meetings, receptions and weddings.
Members have hosted and guests have been hosted as visiting scholars and graduate students who have been treated to breakfast, lunch and supper in the heart of the campus.
12 private rooms can cater between 8 and 250 people.
Background
The Faculty Club was established in 1923
with the assistance of the Board of Governors. Its first premises were located on University Street and several of the academic staff became members.
In 1935 the club moved to its present location in the Baumgarten House on McTavish Street, former home of Sir Arthur Currie. At this time, membership was expanded to include women. Until the 1960s, a few of the male staff members lived in the Club. In the 1970’s, many non-academic staff became eligible for membership.
Former P.M. Justin Trudeau visits McGill
Ballroom
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