Archives for November 2018

Peter Ridd’s trial was set-down to be heard over three days next week, beginning on Monday 12th November. Many of us have made plans to travel to Brisbane – booked and paid for accommodation – to simply be there, to support Peter as he takes on the institutions in his fight for truth, and some quality assurance of Great Barrier Reef science.

I’d been told that the case would be heard by Judge Jarrett, who presided over the proceedings earlier in the year. Now I’m told it’s all been cancelled, at least for the moment – and that Peter can wait until next year, that his case against unfair dismissal by James Cook University might be heard next year.

Over the last week I’ve posted four articles at my blog.

1. ‘Peter Ridd and the Clowns of Reef Science’ is an introduction to some of the issues, taking a bigger picture view.

2. ‘No Mud on my Barnacles’ is for those who like natural history and would like to understand more about me, and the mud at north Queensland beaches.

3. ‘The Prince and His Dump Truck’ is about some of the personalities behind the WWF ‘Save the Reef Campaign’ that was launched in June 2001 – including Willem-Alexander, now the King of Holland.

4. ‘Denying Comment from Experts, from the Marine Geophysical Laboratory’ is about Peter, and also Ken Woolfe who died tragically on 1 December 1999.

I’m hopeful these articles provide some background information – and also encouragement to Peter, who now must suffer through Christmas and the New Year with his life-on-hold.

IN the wake of the very high-profile launch of the WWF Save the Reef Campaign in June 2001, there was a flurry of newspaper articles. They uncritically reported the WWF claim that sediment was literally smothering the corals of the Great Barrier Reef – all the fault of farmers, whose activities needed to be better regulated. Many scientists were quoted in these reports, but never anyone from the Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University. Yet this was the preeminent laboratory for research on physical oceanography, which includes the study of ocean tides, currents, waves, heat and light transfer and, of course, sediments – including their effects on coral reefs.

This laboratory had already been in operation for more than a decade, and was actively working with port authorities in Queensland, particularly to understand the effects of their operations on the natural environment. The laboratory was also involved in deep sea drilling operations to map and understand the overall nature of the crust beneath the ocean floor, with 22 international partners and a specialist drilling ship, the JOIDES Resolution.

Peter Ridd began with the laboratory in 1989, as one of the first four post-doctoral fellows employed there. During the 1990s his contemporaries, Piers Larcombe and Ken Woolfe, published several seminal papers on sediment transport in the Great Barrier Reef lagoon. These were scholarly and detailed assessments. They consistently concluded that the south-easterly trade winds, which blow for about nine months of the year, have a dominant influence on sediment transport. The wind and resulting waves produce a current that flows northward. This current traps sediments in north-facing bays and prevents it from reaching the middle and outer reefs.

Importantly, the work of Piers and Ken established that the amount of sediment in the water – its turbidity – is controlled by the size of the waves, not the volume of sediment. This fact means that any additional sediment coming down the rivers will have no effect on the muddiness of the waters of the reef lagoon. Both Ken and Piers were keen to explain to anyone prepared to listen that the main sediment issues were in rivers before they flowed to the sea.

Back in 2001, the findings of Ken and Piers, already published in international scientific journals, should have been juxtaposed against the naïve assessment promoted by Imogen Zethoven. But if the journalists actually did this, they wouldn’t have a story – presumably they wanted a story, and so they published the fake news from WWF and scientists arguably less well qualified to comment. The work of the Geophysical Laboratory has been mostly ignored over the last twenty years, not only by professional activists but also by governments in the formulation of policy responses.

The work of Peter Ridd was integral to the findings of Ken and Piers because he designed the equipment that they used to measure turbidity.

Ken died tragically on 1 December 1999.

The Geophysical Laboratory was unsuccessful at securing ongoing funding for Piers Larcombe. Peter Ridd was the only one of the four original post-doctoral fellows to survive several decades as an academic at James Cook University, being promoted to Professor in 2008 and becoming the Head of Physics in the same year.

Peter had broad interests in the area of marine geophysics and the Great Barrier Reef, and he published widely in scientific journals. He also led an effective consulting group for 25 years which earned millions of dollars for the University. Much of the consultancy work was monitoring dredging operations, while at the same time providing training for undergraduates. Anglų kalbos kursai https://igudu.lt/anglu-kalbos-kursai/ But Peter is perhaps best known for his inventions, specifically three instruments all built in that Laboratory at James Cook University: a self-cleaning Nephelometer used throughout Australia for dredging that has been copied by manufacturers worldwide; a Tilt Current Meter which has also been sold worldwide; and an optical instrument for measuring mine paste pipe wear that is being used by the mining industries in Australia and the USA.

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This is the fourth post in a series on activism and the Great Barrier Reef, in advance of Peter Ridd arguing against his unfair dismissal by James Cook University in the Federal Court in Brisbane beginning on 12th November.

I lived for three years, from 2009 to 2012, in a delightful house just up from Lammermoor Beach with a view across to Great Keppel Island. Lammermoor Beach is part of the Mackay/Capricorn Management Area of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

Like many of the beaches along north eastern Australia, Lammermoor is aptly described as a ‘low-energy shoreline’. This is because it is sheltered from the Pacific Ocean by the middle and outer reef.

Unlike southern Australian surf beaches, the sand is much grittier, and browner, because the sediment washed down from the Fitzroy river (just to the south) is not washed out to sea. Rather this sediment, which is estimated to accumulate at a rate of nearly 5 million tonnes each year from the Fitzroy River alone, is trapped within the inner reef – a region often referred to as the reef lagoon.

The southern end of Lammermoor beach is especially muddy. This is where the mangroves grow on the mudflats, that are interspersed with rocky shoals exposed at low tide.

Late in the afternoon, and especially at low tide, I could spend hours each day amongst the rock pools doing little more than inspecting the barnacles and watching the sun set to the west.

I remember once turning over a rock, which disturbed a small, metallic green Sowrie crab. It jumped clear of the pool of water, skidded across an oval of mud… straight into the beak of a Spur-winged plover. That afternoon, after gobbling the crab, the plover raised its head, looked into my eyes and called out kerr-kick-ki-ki-ki.

I do like these red-legged, yellow-faced shorebirds. They definitely preferred the muddier parts of Lammermoor beach. I often watched them strut about late in the afternoon, then suddenly stop – freeze, immobilized, as though paralysed – always in the same position with a front-leg bent, head-down, eyes focused on the mud, which often shimmers in the late afternoon sun.

Then just as suddenly as it became immobile, the bird would move again: specifically dip its beak into the goo, and pulls out a large worm.

The worms were always gobbled. After several worms the plovers would make that sound again, kerr-kick-ki-ki-ki.

The mud is always there, at the southern end of Lammermoor. But when the tide is in, and conditions are calm, you can’t see it. In fact, the water at Lammermoor Beach is often crystal clear, and from our house looks emerald green. That is when the breeze is blowing gently.

When the wind freshened, and especially when the wind moves more to the north east, and a swell picks-up – conditions sometimes associated with a low-pressure system – then the waters of Lammermoor Beach become muddy in appearance. The change can be dramatic from one day to the next depending on the strength of the wind and the height of the swell.

This is all consistent with what the marine geophysics have written about the Great Barrier Reef coastline, which includes Lammermoor Beach. Their peer-reviewed technical papers explain in great detail how this ‘bottom sediment’ is resuspended by ‘wave processes’. They also explain that the sediment has been deposited over thousands of years. The technical papers clearly explain that even if the ‘rate of terrigenous sediment supply’ has increased over the last 200 years due to human impacts on the catchments, there is already a lot of mud there. In fact, these same technical papers explain that it is not ‘the supply of sediment’, which determines the muddiness of the reef lagoon.

Yet integral to the last twenty years of Great Barrier Reef activism – especially immediately following the launch of the ‘Save the Great Barrier Reef’ campaign by WWF in June 2001 – is the false notion that before European settlement the waters of the reef lagoon were always crystal clear.

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This blog post is just the second in a new series on the Great Barrier Reef and activism.