By a series of accidental turns and a healthy dose of serendipity I’ve ended up investigating the past. The passing hands of nature’s clock are vital for my work. I’m fascinated by what makes our planet tick and have spent my research career exploring what happened when.

I am an Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellow and Professor of Climate Change at the University of University of New South Wales where my team and I are focussing our efforts on finding lessons from the past.  I’m particularly interested in past and future climates, how people have responded to change, and recent human evolution and migration. To do something positive about climate change, I helped set up a carbon refining company called Carbonscape which has developed technology to fix carbon from the atmosphere and make a host of green bi-products, helping reduce greenhouse gas levels.

You can view my research papers in Google Scholar by clicking here.

This site gives a taster of what I have done and what I am working on now. My recent book is called 1912: The Year The World Discovered Antarctica and looks at the great leap forward in Antarctic scientific discovery that was made a century ago. I was science advisor and interviewed on a Channel 4 TV series with Tony Robinson called Man on Earth, looking at the impact of past climate change on our ancestors. There is also a short online lecture where I talk about some of the bizarre events and eccentric characters that have helped us understand time today.  Or if you fancy a virtual exploration of human evolution in southeast Asia, click on the fieldtrip link to learn about some classic Indonesian archaeological sites which includes the discovery of an entirely new species of human we called Homo floresiensis (popularly known as the ‘hobbits’).

You can follow me on +Intrepid Science with Google+. Movie footage of my fieldwork can be found on the Chris Turney - Intrepid Science Channel (hosted by YouTube). I also use Twitter so you can join us in the field and receive science updates at @ProfChrisTurney.

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