Tuesday 24 October 2017:
The meeting was officially opened by Mr Steve McIntosh (Senior Manager Government and International Affairs) and Professor Henk Heijnis (Leader Environmental Research). All countries were welcomed to Sydney and a special welcome was given to the Japanese FNCA coordinator Dr Namba.
The first day provided the participating countries with an opportunity to highlight their country’s contributions to climate change studies and showcase some studies already underway.
Wednesday 25 October 2017
Specialist talks by some ANSTO researchers on the following topics:
| 1. | Monika Markowska: | Use of Stalagmites in Climate Studies |
| 2. | Dr Quan Hua: | Radiocarbon in Environmental and Climate Studies |
| 3. | Professor David Fink: | Cosmogenic Isotopes in Climate and Landscape Studies |
The FNCA participants were given the opportunity to meet up with ANSTO counterparts and ask the specialist questions.
The remainder of the morning session was spent discussing the major outlines of the work plan. It was decided that the FNCA Climate Change Science project would have two streams:
| 1. | Climate archives - | lakes, mangrove systems, corals, stalagmites, tree rings and giant oysters. |
| 2. | Carbon storage - | storage in terrestrial soils and coastal systems (blue carbon). |
Participating countries then discussed and started writing country contributions based on these two themes.
The afternoon was a technical tour of ANSTO facilities, starting at the Centre for Accelerator Science where ANSTO specialists Dr Mike Hotchkis and Dr Toshi Fujioka explained the workings of the 1MV, 6 MV and the 10MV particle accelerators (there are many possible applications of the AMS systems to the FNCA Climate Change Science project). The tour moved from the Accelerators to the sample preparation area where Dr Fujioka further explained cosmogenic AMS sample preparation.
The tour moved to the Environmental Radioactivity Measurement Centre and inspected the ITRAX sediment core scanning facility. This facility is unique in the world and is used to analyse for sediments, corals, stalagmites, ice-cores, tree-rings, bird feathers, fish, meat and other food samples. It is a useful technique to give high resolution, trace element data for climate archives.
Dr Matt Fischer gave a short presentation on a current ANSTO-China collaboration on the Northern Australia Monsoon phenomenon. He discussed specifically how the the Stalagmite study from the Northern Territory in Australia could contribute to the FNCA project.
The technical tour finished at the low background gamma-facility of the Centre, where Henk Heijnis explained how the facility was built carefully with selected building materials to reduce environmental background radiation. This effort has led to a reduction of 25-30% in natural background radiation interaction with the sensitive, high-purity germanium detector systems.
Thursday 26 October 2017
On Thursday morning a first draft of the meeting report was shown to the team and some guidelines were given as to how to further refine and improve the workplans for each country. Collaboration between countries was encouraged.
The rest of the Thursday was spent on writing the country workplans and to tighten up timeframes for case studies. The official timeline is from March 2017 to March 2020.
All participating countries delivered a draft workplan with schedules for activities up to the end of the first quarter of 2020. The facilitators (Heijnis and Fischer) compiled all country reports into one workplan and shared this with the group for initial endorsement. Some countries need some more time to check with their organisations and collaborators before submitting a more definite country program. The second draft of the country plans are due to Henk Heijnis by 15 November 2017.
The project meeting wrapped up by briefly introducing the host city planned for the 2018 annual meeting.Dr Ali Arman Lubis introduced the University of Diponegoro in the City of Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia. The University is on the outskirts of the city on the North Coast Central Java, and offers both coastal as well as inland lakes for a technical field visit during the meeting. The meeting will be co-hosted by Dr Ali Arman (BATAN) and Dr Tri Soeprobawati, Vice Dean for Resources and Innovations, School of Postgraduate Studies, University of Diponegoro,
The meeting officially closed at 16:00 and the organizers officially thanked the FNCA staff, the ANSTO International Liaison team and all contributors. They wished all participants a safe journey home.
