One of Australia’s leading geophysicists will tackle the hot topic of changing sea levels in a free public talk – the Joseph Gentilli Memorial Lecture – at The University of Western Australia next week.

Professor Kurt Lambeck, President of the Australian Academy of Science, will review past changes in sea level and the implications for glaciations and past shoreline reconstructions in his lecture Sea level change through the ages: Learning from the past to understand the future.

Professor of Geophysics at the Australian National University and strategic science advisor to National Geospatial Reference System of Geoscience Australia, Professor Lambeck will discuss causes of present-day change, and future scenarios in which major change will be driven more by human-induced processes than by the natural processes representative of the past.

He was elected to lead Australia's senior organisation of research scientists and technologists, the Australian Academy of Science, in May 2006, succeeding Dr Jim Peacock, now Australia’s Chief Scientist.

Professor Lambeck was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 1984 and to the Royal Society in 1994. He is a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993), Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (1994), Academia Europaea (1999), and the Académie des Sciences, Institut de France (2005).

The lecture will be held at 6pm on Tuesday, October 16, 2007 in UWA’s Social Sciences Lecture Theatre.

The 2007 Joseph Gentilli Memorial Lecture was established in 2005 to honour the memory and intellectual legacy of one of Western Australia’s leading scholars. It is supported by the School of Earth and Geographical Sciences and the Institute of Advanced Studies.

Media references

Audrey Barton 61 8 6488 1340
(Institute of Advanced Studies)

Simone Hewett / Sally-Ann Jones 61 8 6488 7977
(UWA Public Affairs) 0420 790 097 / 0420 790 098