CRP El Niño member
Mr. Greg Skilbeck
University of Technology, Sydney
Sydney, Australia
Scientific Background
Greg Skilbeck is a graduate of the University of Sydney where he undertook honours in vertebrate paleontology followed by doctoral studies in the analysis of sedimentary environments. He worked briefly in the petroleum exploration industry upon graduation but returned to academia in the late 1980's. Since that time he has worked in Applied Geology and then Environmental Sciences where he has been head of department for the past eight years.
An initial research interest in the dynamics of sedimentary basin formation at convergent margins led to his first ocean drilling program cruise to the western Mediterranean in search of extant analogues. During this cruise he developed an interest in paleoceanography and paleoclimate studies, and subsequently initiated a study of Late Quaternary sea level, environmental and paleoclimate work in temperate eastern Australian coastal lakes. He sailed on Leg 201 of the ODP in 2002, which had the prime object of studying the deep biosphere in the eastern Pacific Ocean, but also yielded a long, high-resolution sedimentary record of El Niņo over the past 20,000 years and this has become the focus of his current research.
He has expertise in sedimentary facies analysis, wireline log and seismic interpretation, and physical properties of sedimentary materials.
Current Research
Current research is being conducted in the general area of deciphering long-term El Niņo variability with the main aim of relating this to the drought cycles in eastern Australia. The work is centered in two main areas, eastern temperate Australian estuaries, and the Peru continental margin. In the former, cores spanning the present to last sea-level highstand have been collected from a number of coastal lakes and a range of physical properties collected (magnetic susceptibility, SIRM, ARM, density, grain size, TC, TOC, CaCO3 and mineralogy by XRD) and regional cyclicity at the centennial and millennial scales identified. Following sparker surveying, we have recently obtained a number of 6 m Holocene sections in order to address previous resolution problems.
The Peruvian margin work has proceeded in two stages. Study on the early post deglaciation section in Hole 1227B has identified an interannual El Niņo signal supported by multiproxy analysis over the period 17,300-15,750 cal yr BP, which is intended to be published in 2005. Work on the Holocene section in Holes 1228B and 1229E has proceeded to the stage of defining the chronology and over the next 1-2 years we acquire geochemical and physical proxies at the interannual scale.
