Was Australia Wetter Than Slovenia?
Miran Udovč
Date of publication:
The world-renowned tall limestone pinnacles in the Pinnacle Desert, located in Australia’s Nambung National Park, are approximately 100,000 years old. At that time, Australia was even wetter than Slovenia. This surprising finding was discovered by scientists using an innovative method, including Prof. Dr. Andrej Šmuc and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Aleš Šoster from the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering at the University of Ljubljana, and Dr. Matej Lipar and Dr. Mateja Ferk from the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU).
Slovenian researchers, together with their Australian and English colleagues, studied one of the world’s most picturesque karst landscapes: The Pinnacle Desert in Nambung National Park, Western Australia. This area is famous for its unique karst terrain, featuring limestone pinnacles rising several meters above the desert sands. The formation of these pinnacles, especially their age, remained unknown until now.
Using a revolutionary method of dating iron concretions on carbonate pinnacles and a geochronological (U/Th)-He clock, the researchers were the first in the world to determine the age of karstification in Pleistocene limestones. Their geological clock consistently showed an age of approximately 100,000 years.
During this period, the same chemical processes that enabled the growth of iron concretions in the soil also led to the rapid dissolution of the underlying limestone, forming the pinnacles we see today. This required a substantial amount of water, and the researchers simultaneously uncovered and confirmed one of the wettest interglacial periods in the last half-million years.
Their innovative approach to dating karst landforms revealed a much wetter Western Australia, drastically different from its current arid conditions. At that time, Australia was even wetter than modern-day Slovenia.
The exceptional value of this research lies in the universal applicability of the introduced dating method for similar karst formations with iron concretions. This method enables precise studies of environmental changes and rapid climate fluctuations over the past few million years.
You can read more about the study in the prestigious journal Science Advances and the popular science platform The Conversations.
The authors of the contribution are:
dr. Matej Lipar (matej.lipar@zrc-sazu.si), dr. Milo Barham (Milo.Barham@curtin.edu.au), dr. Martin Danišík (M.Danisik@curtin.edu.au), prof. dr. Andrej Šmuc (andrej.smuc@ntf.uni-lj.si), prof. dr. John A. Webb (John.Webb@latrobe.edu.au), dr. Kenneth J. McNamara (kenneth.mcnamara@uwa.edu.au), dr. Aleš Šoster (ales.soster@ntf.uni-lj.si), dr. Mateja Ferk (mateja.ferk@zrc-sazu.si)
