The big Australian Earth Science event of 2018 is almost upon us - AGCC 2018! https://www.agcc.org.au/

In addition to the technical sessions, please come along to a Sedimentologists gathering! This informal meeting will hopefully be a great opportunity to get together with lovers of sedimentology from across the country and overseas, to meet old friends and makes some new ones. We hope to see you there, 6-7pm Tesday 16th October, meeting room R4.

The full program has now been released, and it is looking to be a most excellent meeting. For the sedimentology community, there are a lot of sessions to keep an eye out for,some of which are:
- Source-to-sink sedimentary Basin Processes
- Advances in structural, igneous metamorphic and sedimentary geology
- Prediction, Process, Place: Geomorphology
- Understanding the Surface
- Earth's Climate, Past, Present and Future
- Marine Geoscience - the Evolving Oceans
- Ancient and Historical Record of Life in Australia
- The Origins and Development of Life
- Mass Extinctions
- Petroleum and its co-products
- Groundwater challenges and opportunities
- The National Virtual Core Library
- Planning the Future of Geoscience
- Geoscience aspects of the storage of energy related waste
- Geoscience data delivery
- Ediacaran and Cambrian Symposium
- Mathematics, modelling, AI, robotics and machine learning applied to the acquisition and interpretation of large or complex geoscience data sets
- Geohazards, risk and mitigation
- Geology in Society: geotourism and geoheritage
- Geobiology
- Optimisation and uncertainties in Earth models
- Making better exploration decisions through an integrated geoscience approach

What a great conference! AESC certainly delivered some top notch research presentations this week. My highlights from the last few days of the conference have been at very different ends of the geologic timescale - Southern Hemisphere Quaternary, and Neoproterozoic Earth. The resolution of investigation and interpretations are strikingly different when listening to presentations on these different ages of succesion.

We heard from several high-resolution palaeoclimatic interpretations from lake, marsh and ocean cores, helping to shed light on key research questions such as what reconstructions of hydrological variability from around Australia can tell us about continental scale and global atmospheric climate during the Quaternary, the reconstruction of the position and strength of ocean currents, and whether hydrological variability and increases in dust accumulation could be related to megafaunal extinction. Dust also featured in the final plenary presentation by Prof. Paul Hoffman about Snowball Earth, which also highlighted the role of cap carbonate sedimentology, stratigraphy and geochemistry in our reconstructions of this time. The usefulness of detrital zircon chronologies for piecing together the palaeographic reconstructions of ancient basins was seen in several presentations.

The next AESC won't be for another two years, but there are tentative plans in the pipeline for a GSA Sedimentology Group field workshop during 2017. Watch this space!

The Australian Earth Sciences Convention is off to a great start today with some excellent sedimentology presentations. Highlights included the Reservoir Analogues session talks, including an interpretation of the Durham Downs gas field fluvial reservoirs, a modern study investigating why rivers avulse, a detailed outcrop investigation of fluvial-deltaic and salt-withdrawal minibasin deposits in the Flinders Ranges, and an investigation of the influence of organic matter on dynamics of clay sediment gravity flows. Another highlight was the full day of presentations on the scientific results of the International Ocean Discovery Program. We're looking forward to the next 3 days of the conference!

The program for the upcoming Australian Earth Sciences Convention is now published, and it looks like there will be some excellent sedimentology and stratigraphy presentations.

There will hopefully be a meeting of the GSA Sedimentology Special Interest Group during AESC; we’ll post an announcement here when it is arranged.
Hope to see you there! 26-30th June, Adelaide Convention Centre. www.aesc2016.gsa.org.au


I've had a look through the program and extracted presentations with a sedimentology focus. If you think I've missed any, please post details in the comments!

ORAL PRESENTATIONS

Sara Moron Polanco
Investigating causes of river avulsion: a case study from the Magdalena River, Colombia. Insights for fluvial petroleum Reservoirs

John Counts
Sedimentology and Salt-Sediment Interaction in a Clastic Fluvial-Deltaic System from the Adelaide Rift Complex of South Australia

Melissa Craig
Experimental analogue study - How does organic matter affect the head velocity and run-out distance of cohesive sediment gravity flows?

Adriana Dutkiewicz
Controls on the global distribution of seafloor sediments: implications for the interpretation of the deep-sea sedimentary record

Ron Hackney
Deep stratigraphic drilling for tectonics, climate and ancient life on the Lord Howe Rise continental ribbon

Brad Pillans
Lake George: a sedimentary archive of the Quaternary Period

Glen Bann
Tuffs, dykes, xenoliths, glendonites, fossils and volcanoes; a review of the volcanology and sedimentation of the Mid Permian southern Sydney Basin

Penelope Clifford
Sedimentary processes, stratigraphic sequences, and middens: the link between archaeology and geoheritage – a case study from the Quaternary of the Broome region, Western Australia

Johnathon Tyler
The nature and causes of megadroughts in south-eastern Australia: evidence from Holocene lake sediments, Victoria

Ian Brandes de Roos
Sedimentary basins for geothermal energy: the Montgomery House example

Sandra Occhipinti
Development of the northern Yilgarn margin between 2200 and 1960 Ma - as recorded in the volcano-sedimentary record

Simon Holford
Insights into the nature and extent of sedimentary basins underlying the Eucla Basin from reprocessing and interpretation of the 13GA-EG1 Eucla-Gawler Seismic Survey

Jordan Mill
Sequence Stratigraphic Analysis of the Epsilon Formation, Merrimelia Ridge, Cooper Basin - South Australia

Robert Nicoll
Cisuralian stratigraphy, biostratigraphy and interbasin correlation, eastern Australia: implications for exploration

Carmine Wainman
Climate or Subsidence? Geologic Controls on the Stratigraphic Distribution of Coal Beds in the Jurassic Walloon Coal Measures, Surat Basin, Australia

Elizabeth Jagodzinski
Precise zircon U-Pb dating of volcanic horizons in the Palaeoproterozoic Wilyama Supergroup of the Curnamona Province: advances in stratigraphy of the Olary Domain

Catherine Brown
Defining Stratigraphic Units; more than polygons in a GIS

Alex Cherry
Sedimentary facies within the Olympic Dam Breccia Complex: A potential metal source

Judith Travers
Improving the Durham Downs Gas Field three dimensional earth model by integrating regional data, image log data and seismic waveform classification

POSTER PRESENTATIONS

Alan Collins
U-Pb and Hf Zircon Data Sources the New Zealand Torlesse and the Ceduna Sub-Basin Sediment Origin to Queensland, Indicating Widespread Mesozoic Erosion and Sediment Distribution

Laura Phillips
Sedimentary trends in Late Permian coal measure strata, Galilee Basin

Valeria Bianchi
Coupling dynamic topography with Stratigraphic Forward Modelling: case study Springbok Sandstone

Carmine Wainman
The Correlation of Fluvio-Lacustrine Strata with Dated Volcanic Tuffs: An Example from the Jurassic Walloon Coal Measures, Australia