I wanted to talk to you first about your research into coral coring. Could you describe what coral coring is and why you do it? Yes, the coring we're doing is a bit unusual. A lot of people core individual corals where they'll go out with scuba, find a large coral balmy, and they'll core into that to get a recent paleo climate record because the corals, sort of like trees, they have annual growth bands that you can count and see which year is which, and then we can perform geochemical analyses and get temperature, pH, water quality, a lot of different sort of information, but it's dated. The coring we're doing here is on a coring platform and we're getting reef cores where instead of finding an individual coral out on the reef front, we're drilling through the reef flat, straight down, in order to get the historical record of the last eight to 9,000 years of reef growth. And so you get all the things the reef is made of, you get corals, you also get sand, gravel, all the things you see on a coral reef may be accumulated underneath where you're coring. And that way we can get records when we get individual corals of water temperature, pH, water quality back through the last thousands and thousands of years. And so it's basically paleo climate data. How far down do you have to get to get eight to 9,000 years worth of data? Well, the modern Great Barrier Reef is only about eight to 9,000 years old and it's sitting on top of a limestone plateau that was made by the last coral reef when sea level was this high during the last interglacial, so about 130,000, 20,000 years ago, that made a reef. And then of course sea level fell down to as low as 130 meters lower than modern and then it's come back up. And it was only eight, 9,000 years ago when you flooded those old Pleistocene, the last reef, which was high and dry all in between. And then you've, as sea level came up, the reef could grow back up under it. And our research is much concerned with how fast did the reef reestablish once you flooded on top of this limestone? And then how fast did it grow up? Did it keep up with sea level as sea level rose during the deglacial as you're rising sea level back up to modern levels? Did it keep up with that or did it lag behind that? And then once it did catch up, the reef has to grow sideways because the corals and the reef can't grow out of the water. They can't just keep growing vertically. So wherever you get this core down, you'll only get one growth increment, but out here you'll get maybe younger corals because it reached sea level here and then it starts growing laterally and so your young things may be in another direction, seaward. And so we're getting nests of these cores in order to get the full picture of the vertical reef growth and the lateral reef growth. So I guess looking in the past gives you some pictures into how corals can adapt to changing conditions then? Yes, yeah, exactly. The ultimate change in condition is this was limestone with kangaroos jumping on it before it got flooded. And so you've changed that. You've had to wash off the plants, any soil that developed. You've had to clean it up as marine waters came in and then at some point you had those corals that re-established the reef and the entire Great Barrier Reef was high and dry and so you had to get larvae in and build it up afresh in that little amount of time through the Holocene. And so understanding did you start with different communities? Did you have these great pioneer coral communities that started the reef off and then they shifted into the coral communities we know now? There's all kinds of questions like that and the only way we can answer them is by doing this. So have you found that corals do recover or they are able to adapt to changing conditions quite quickly? Well, yeah, quickly is an interesting question. We're looking at thousands of years of data, how quick is quick. And that's the real problem with the problems we face with human induced climate change. We may be changing things quicker than they've happened in nature. As a geologist, I never worried much about coral reefs for a lot of years because they're able to come back from being dead. You know, this reef was dead only 10,000 years ago, at least here. There were corals out in the coral sea somewhere and refugia. And we know that there were corals along the continental shelf edge that the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program drilled some time ago. And so those reefs now we have some data. And there were reefs off but the Great Barrier Reef was gone entirely. And through the quaternary, we've had glacial interglacial cycles at 100,000 years to 40,000 year cycles. And so the reef's dead, reef comes back. Reef's dead, reef comes back. Reef's dead, reef comes back. It gave us a bit of a false sense of security about resilience. And that's why we think so much about resilience. And of course, then you have the work about intermediate disturbance that maybe the diversity on reefs is because cyclones come through, wipe things out every now and then. New corals have a chance to get a foothold and you never go to this climax community where you're dominated by the one coral that's best at doing what it's doing. And so we think, wow, corals like to live in these incredibly fierce environments. Sea level is a rough place to be. Storms, waves. And you go from the beautiful, glassy weather that we had fortunately last week to the kinda windy, wavy stuff. And of course, the cyclone, it moves. Blocks that can be 10 meters in diameter around. I mean, it just bashes everything, kills globs of coral and everything. And reefs inhabit that environment. They're happy to do that. That's what they do. And so everybody's thinking, wow, coral reefs can handle about anything. They're tough. But of course, then you throw in people and you fish on them and you change coastal process. You degrade water quality. And now with global warming, the other horrible thing about corals is they commonly grow best right at the tolerance of the temperature that will inevitably kill them. They like to live on the edge. Thrill seekers, you know, in so many ways. And so if you make it a little bit warmer and they don't have time to adapt, you know, then you get the coral bleaching issues. And then of course, the certification. I don't like that word so much. The ocean's still massively alkaline, but you're dropping pH. That can have things that are worse than, you know, corals, I'm not that worried. Corals, biologically, they'll expend energy to make their skeletons. Maybe they'll grow slower. There's all kinds of studies. Corals can grow without a skeleton if you put them in acidic enough water. Certain species can. Some lovely experiments done. There are other things out here though that are non-obligate calcifiers that accidentally make calcium carbonate. And there's some of the things that make the reef really rigid and hard. And they're microbial communities. They make microbialites. And so these rocks made by microbes, they do a lot of the hardening to really glue the surface of the reef together and make it rigid enough that when a cyclone comes, it doesn't wash the whole reef edifice away. They make hard rock out of it. And they don't expend any energy to do that. It's an accidental byproduct of their metabolism. And if we decrease pH enough to make it where they don't calcify anymore, that could have a significant effect. And the beach rock, you see, that's just marine cement. There are microbialites in that as well. If you lower the pH enough and you stop making beach rock, then caves like this, that's one of the major things that protects the cave from erosion is that beach rock. So there's a lot of physical chemistry thing that doesn't relate to the corals that might actually be more significant in terms of some of these issues. You mentioned how originally you weren't that concerned about corals because you could see how resilient they've been through the Earth's past. At what point did you start to realize that maybe they're being stressed beyond their ability to adapt? It's really in the last decade. And I think that the thing that probably made a big difference is just the concept that a lot of scientists in Queensland have been doing, but around the world looking at shifting baselines that you look at a reef today and you didn't realize it was already degraded from fishing, even from indigenous populations and not to say Australian indigenous populations, but just that human activity had already caused degradation in a lot of reefs and you thought you were looking at a healthy reef and it wasn't even healthy then. And the news that the Great Barrier Reef has actually got degradation that we didn't realize from fishing in particular. And you know the inshore reefs from land use. If you're gonna dig and if you're gonna plant clear trees, you dump things out into the rivers, this stuff gets out. And we've killed a lot of inshore reefs, same as in the Caribbean, they cut down all the trees for fuel, runoff, carry sediment out. Reefs don't like the nutrients, they don't like the sediment.  The Great Barrier Reef, so many reefs are far off shore, they're a little bit safe from that, at least, but fishing. And then of course, crown of thorns, cyclones and these natural sort of things just compound on what's anthropogenic. And it's so complicated. A lot of people probably feel like they know exactly what's going on. I know, I don't know what's going on, but it scares me that I can't say I know what's going on because I'm interested and I'm studying these things. One of the big factors with the Great Barrier Reef is crown of thorns, as you mentioned. Has human activities had a role in crown of thorns influencing the reef? Well, you know, a lot of people think that it has. But it's a hard thing to say because this is where we need these paleo records to see earlier records of outbreaks that are 5,000 years ago. Could it be that this can happen sometimes? We have such a short timeframe to understand things based on instrumental records for climate, for instance, and based on observations and fishing reports. We just have a snapshot in terms of what makes the reef. It makes it very, very difficult to know. Maybe occasionally these things go nuts. There's some evidence to suggest that's unlikely and that they kill off corals in areas where the reef just doesn't seem to recover anything. Well, if they had done that before, there wouldn't have been a reef here in the first place. And there's been a lot of argument like that. Efforts to go back and look for them in the record are stymied because coring out here is a hard thing to do. Trying to understand these issues, it really is hard. Even things like cyclones, there's a lot of press out saying, oh, cyclones are more numerous and worse than they've ever been before. But if you look back, they look on the Great Barrier Reef. Cyclones went through a period from the 70s up through into the 2000s where there were way fewer cyclones than there had been in the previous. And an interesting paper was presented, and forgive me, I can't remember who presented it a few months ago at the Australian Coral Reef Society meeting, but he looked at these data and he said maybe our idea of coral cover is based on a period of infrequent cyclones and that normally there would be less coral cover. So maybe it's not as bad as we think based on the coral cover we're seeing now. You'd like to, maybe that's a little ray of sunshine, but the data certainly showed that the frequency of cyclones over the last decades is far less than it was in the many decades before that. But of course, there seem to be more bigger cyclones in the end of that data set. But if you could take that data set further back, maybe there would be bigger ones, you know? That's why we need paleo data. We need to get back thousands of years of data instead of just hundreds of years of data. Is a paleo data able to provide any answers about psychoanactivity going back thousands of years? We hope so. We've been able to do pretty well with over the last hundreds of years. I have a colleague at UQ who has dated reef blocks that have been thrown up in China and here in different places and looking at the ages of those in sediment piles. And you find frequency distributions that suggest that there's a high cyclonic activity, high cyclonic, and they could even date some of them and for the really recent record, tie them to particular cyclones. Say this was thrown up in that cyclone. And you'd get an age distribution where corals of about immediately preceding that cyclone were common as this rubble on the reef flat. There are ways. The older you go back, the harder that gets because you need a lot of numbers in order to play the statistics to see if it's reasonable or not. As you look back over thousands of years, do you see many natural cycles in climate? Yeah, well, we know that there are a lot of interesting smaller scale cycles that operated a lot of different potentially periodicities, but at least cyclicities at the thousands of year levels, some at the hundreds of years, some 11 year sunspots. All of these different cycles potentially have effects, especially that when compounded upon each other might lead to a swing in something else, knowing where we sit on those different cycles, what drives them, and what their results are through time.  Are there things like that in the record? I'm very keen to see if we get corals at the right age in some of our cores, the medieval warm period, some people say, oh, that's a local effect. It was a local effect in quite a few places based on good data. Could we see that the water was actually warmer on the Great Barrier Reef during that interval of time? That would be so important because then we might figure out, well, what could cause that? I mean, what is driving those smaller temperature changes? What happens when we compound those cycles on top of anthropogenic changes? Can we recognize what the contribution is? If we can't understand the natural stuff, how do we deconvolve what's anthropogenic and get better predictions? So I think that the paleo record is critical for that and it's really the only place you can get it. One thing I was curious about was whether signals like the medieval warm period or the little ice age appear in your coral data? Well, we will find out, I hope. We have to get corals of those ages and you don't know what you're gonna get.  And one of the exciting things from the last core we brought up is we had a Parides individual coral that looks like it's more than two meters in thickness where we cored through it and that was 14 to 15 meters below the current reef flat. And so we'll date that coral. It'll be potentially hundreds of years of paleo climate record, sea water temperature, water quality and we'll know the age. And so with luck, it'll fall in an age that's interesting. We're very interested in around 6,000 years to 5,500 years, for instance, because the coral reefs in Morton Bay died at about 5,800 years at all bathymetries at Cleveland and Wellington Point. We had a paper out last year and dated corals across the entire surface and they basically all stopped at the same time. And there's a lot of things that could do that in Morton Bay. It clearly wasn't Europeans 5,800 years ago and it wasn't the indigenous people either. There's some natural thing that killed off a huge beautiful coral reef in Morton Bay. And so what happened on the Great Barrier Reef at that time? We know some other inshore reefs farther north had issues at that mid-holocene, about 5,000, 6,000 years ago too. Some reefs stepped back, some reefs died. There are a lot of interesting things that have happened in the Holocene that we don't know what did it. We know it wasn't us. And that's maybe one of the other things that makes me a little more nervous for reefs. Anthropogenic, we know we're doing some devastating things to so many environments, not just coral reefs. And what happens if one of these things that can wipe out a reef in Morton Bay should happen now when we're already doing all this other stuff? We're doing what we're doing, that's not so great. And then one of these other natural things comes along. What's gonna happen with that? There's so many uncertainties, we know so little. It makes you more and more nervous, to be honest. What are the other ways that scientists are measuring past climate change back before the instrumental record? Well, it's kind of fun, the group I work in is called the Integrated Paleo-Environmental Research Group in the School of Earth Sciences. And we have the Radiogenic Isotope Facility for dating. We have geochemistry in there, but we have people working both the terrestrial record and the marine record. So I'm doing a lot of the work in the marine saw. That's, and a lot of colleagues. Zhenjing Zhao is doing the dating and so forth. We've got a ton of people working. And then you've got people working on the megafauna record, but also on the small mammal and small vertebrate record in cave deposits, where we can also date these with the same kind of techniques and look at faunal change. And then we've got speleothemes, things like stalagmites that accumulate bit by bit by bit by bit. And those give you these nice time series records too, where we can look at things like rainfall, potentially temperature, humidities, the big thing we can get from those, but they're dateable and you can find when it's wet or drier, you can also match that then to the fauna. And one of the big shocks we had some years ago with colleagues at the Queensland Museum and QUT and UQ, we found that caves up at Rockhampton, which are just on shore from where we are here at here, and basically inland a bit, caves there showed that from before, about 320,000 years ago, you had enclosed Papua New Guinea style rainforest at Mount Etna just north of Rockhampton. I mean, that's tree kangaroos. That's the full on real rainforest stuff that occurs now in Papua that you don't even have in Australia. And then by about 280,000 years ago, it had gone to desert. I mean, it had just eridified. All of that ecosystem was gone and it had become arid. And then it's slowly gotten a bit more humid back to what we have today. Well, we had no clue until we started doing this type of work that that level of environmental change had happened from Papua New Guinea to out back to Longreach over the space of some tens of thousands of years, that recently. And I mean, we're talking hundreds of thousands of years, but still that's a big whack of change. And now we're pushing that to other cave systems where you can record these types of things and where you can date the faunal assemblages and looking at other big changes. And that's one place. How broad was that?  Or was it a broader thing by being able to date these different types of deposits and look at the marine record as well as the terrestrial? We can weed out local effects if you see the same kind of things happening in the marine and terrestrial that are dating at the same time. You have a high probability that you're looking at a more climate related sort of issue rather than a local perturbation of some kind. And so we're really keen to look at that Holocene record that last 10,000 years or so in caves and we're working on some caves up at Mount Etna now carefully layer by layer looking at the different little fauna and I've got these guys who love to look at rat teeth and so forth. We're trying to learn to extract geochemistry from those teeth as well to look at diet, potentially migratory patterns, quite a few different things to really tie down the ecology. Then you can tie that to the climate signatures that that ecology requires. And then date it in with U-series dating so that you know when it was. And then we can start comparing, well on the reef you're seeing this, on the coast you're seeing this. And then maybe we'll start to figure out a little bit more about these climatic issues that have been happening over the last 10,000 years and it'd be nice to find good news. But I mean, all news makes you better fit to model and potentially have predictive models that will give us better results. So our scientists using, let me see if I understand this right, fossilized rat teeth to work out what these creatures were looking thousands of years ago. Yeah, it's amazing the way things are going. You can look at the carbon isotopes in teeth and get an idea whether they were eating grass type things or whether they were eating shrubby or fruity type things and so forth. And so that gives you an indication of what the vegetation was like in that region. And you mentioned also cave dropping. So is that looking at what creatures were depositing droppings in that cave over thousands of years? Yeah, well, commonly you get owl roost deposits are wonderful because owls fly out and they sample the small vertebrate community from a wide area. And so if you can get an accumulation under an owl or other predators, there's Tassie Devils and Sarcophilus, these guys carry, and they chew bones up a lot. They don't leave you a lot and the ghost bat, Macro Dermagigus, these things don't leave a lot either but occasionally they drop a bit on the floor that's still identifiable. They chew their food up really well, teeth and all. But all of these things do bring fauna in and of course the odd beast he falls in or wanders in and can't get out. And so you do get a good record of the local ecology that way and stratified, they just build up layers and layers and so you can work your way back through time. If you're lucky and you have a bit of a flow stone that's pretty clean, it can be dated and you have a date between that layer and that layer and you can bracket and little thin straws, the starts of stalactites on the ceiling, they don't last very long, they're fragile, they commonly fall in and they usually fall, I mean they're not gonna hang up there for a long time and then fall in way later so they commonly provided a relatively close date to the layer they fall into. They're not a whole lot older than that layer and so you get a lot of ways and we're trying to directly date the teeth and bones as well. I have a colleague who's doing some wonderful work with that, Gilbert Price. And if we can date individual bones then effectively then you won't need to worry about whether they're bracketed with nice flow stones which are easier to date now. So we're trying to get these things done technically very challenging. So it's like building a jigsaw puzzle using droppings and stalagmites and fossilized bones. It's everything, you have to be holistic about your data. Nobody can just specialize and say we're gonna understand everything based on this one record, like an ice core record or one deep sea core. We need to use everything at our disposal that has a historical record because it's so hidden miss on what gets recorded in a given place you have access to the samples. Most history is gone forever. You think of everything that's lived on the earth. If you had a fossil remain of it, the whole earth would be nothing but fossils. Most things that die are eaten, consumed, destroyed, oxidized, leave no record at all. So these fossil deposits where you get this lovely history preserve are not that common. And that's why I love a quarry. I study rocks that organisms make and try to understand how the chemistry of those rocks tells you about the past environment and how it's changed by things that happen to rock through time. And I work on some really old rocks too, not just these really young rocks. But if we can understand those records and reefs build a nice sequential record too, the problem is it's under the living coral. And so whereas in a cave, you might go in there and dig a hole in the floor, it's very, you don't wanna dynamite a trench in the coral reef. You'd love to know when they're gonna do it for a harbor or something like that so you could be there and actually document everything. If it's gonna happen, you wanna at least get the scientific data. But the best we can do now is put little skinny cores down, but we put them out in geometric patterns and transects so that we can get the maximum data.  You don't know. So by putting down several in a row close to each other, that's when you can start really seeing, well, it grew up like that, then it started going that way and you can date when that happened and you can see what the water temperature was and you can see which corals were happy. I guess on that front then, I don't suppose you could describe a little bit more about the actual process of extracting a core out of a car? Yeah, well, this will be a little bit emotive. It's a drilling rig and so you have a drilling rig. It spins a pipe that you have a bit on the bottom, but it's hollow and you grind a whole shape hole down, but the rock in the middle doesn't get ground up.  Well, when you're down there 20 meters, there's a lot of meter and a half, so you have to take in one pipe at a time. You add them in, put it down, add them in, put it down and then you have to take it out, bring it up, take that one out, bring it up, take that one out, up and down, up and down. We've got where down the bottom, it takes about 45 minutes to an hour to get a core barrel from 15 to 20 meters down and so it's a long hard slog. It's taking us about two days per core, so 10 meters a day basically to get these and we're about to start coring a little bit deeper and just get a little more record on the bottom.  Does the paleoclimate record tell you anything about sea levels in the past? Well, you know, we already have a lot of data for where sea level was at different times. From coral reefs, coral reefs are your best sea level datum because a coral reef grows up to sea level and then it has to stop. It can't grow up anymore, so it grows out and individual corals do that that you see on the reef flat. You get micro atolls, one colony on the reef flat grows up, it reaches that low tide level or the ponding level and then the top dies because sooner or later it gets a cold night or a bad thing at low tide, but it keeps growing out and so you get these flat top corals. They tell you where the water level is and so that's been done all over the place, you know, at different reefs around the world to construct what the de-glacial sea level curve was like and where it was at a given time. Then we can drill down here and date our corals and corals don't always grow up to sea level. When you first flood this platform that was here, sea level may have risen faster than what the reef could grow up under it and we call that a catch up reef. So you have a reef community is trying to catch up to sea level, it's growing straight up. Once it gets up, then it can only grow sideways and you end up with this beautiful datum. Those are the kind of things we're trying to figure out by dating these corals. Where did Heron Reef reach sea level first? When did it start growing this way or did it grow more that way? You know, which directions did it grow? Did it grow up all in one kind of line and then grow out or did it grow up in a few little spots and then they coalesced as they caught up and grew out? We don't know those kind of things, but we'd like to and we'd like to see which corals were best at coping with sea level rise. That's a handy thing to know if we're worried about sea level rise. I think the corals are gonna handle that okay. Decays may have a lot more trouble. You know, mobile sand corals will just grow up and say, oh, more water to grow in. We're happy as Larry unless it's hot water to grow in. But you give them more space, they'll fill it. As they have done here at Heron Reef, when they changed the bund wall around the harbor, they added about 20 centimeters of water depth to the reef flat out here past the wreck just off the research station. And that's why you've got all this crop right there now. It's grown up, that wasn't there 10 years ago because the water level was lower. It's grown up and taken up that space. So in a decade, the corals there have grown up 20 centimeters, no problem. Now they're dying because they've reached where they can get, they're eroding, but you're getting some of them are being cemented over by coral and red algae. Some just marine cement coming out of the seawater, no doubt is lithifying them. Microbes may be lithifying them deep down inside. And that will become good new reef flat. And it only took a decade to grow up that high. So there's hope for corals. Of course, it hadn't been a cyclone here in that time. And so a cyclone just, that's the weed of the sea, grass that Acropora cyclones or lawnmowers for those corals turn them into sticks and then you have big gravel piles and sand. And then they have to start over and grow back up in that same space. But that's natural, that's how coral reefs behave. And as sea level rises, the corals will grow up to that new sea level if the corals are healthy enough. There's periods in Earth's history when there were practically no carbonate corals. What does that tell you about coral's ability to adapt to climate change or other corals? Well, you know, the sclerotinian corals evolved, you know, back after, well, I have colleagues, we debate these kind of things. But you know, around 250 million years ago, they're bouts at the end of the Paleozoic, the Permian. You had a giant extinction event and it killed off the earlier types of corals, rugos and tabulate corals. They weren't great reef builders anyway, but there are little reefs, you know, out past Rockhampton that have a higher coral content than modern sclerotinian coral reefs like the Great Barrier Reef. I mean, in terms of density, some of these older Paleozoic reefs, they were quite small, but I mean, they're good coral reefs for the Paleozoic. Then you had your sclerotinian corals evolve and they've gone up and down a little bit, but they were making reefs fairly soon after they evolved of different types. But the longer term geological history of reefs is an amazing thing with huge amounts of climate change relative to what we're thinking about in the modern. You know, you go into ice house times when you have glacial, interglacials, and then you have green house times, like through the Cretaceous and then the Paleocene, when there was probably no ice on Earth during some of those times, even on mountaintops, it was just hot. There were dinosaurs and conifers and the Arctic Circle kind of things and Antarctica. No continental ice for certain. Massively different climate, huge amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. The corals were happy to live in that, but of course, it's a double-edged sword when you have a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere and you have rock exposed.  And it will weather silicate rocks like minerals in granite, you know, these volcanic rocks. It weathers those and one of the byproducts is bicarbonate, which flows to the ocean. The carbonate that's in the ocean that organisms make skeletons out of isn't from the CO2 in the atmosphere so much. It's from weathering rocks on the continent.  And organisms just biologically can evolve to things that happen slowly enough, we assume. So you always had some corals going. I reckon you always did. You don't always have their fossil record on them. So the weirdest things we just found on a dredging back about two years ago of the Tasmanid sea mount chain in the Coral Sea but just off the continental shelf of Australia. We were dredging these, you know, volcanoes. They all formed down at a latitude around Tasmania, we believe, and then the continent's been moving north and carrying them north, so they're older towards the north and they get younger and younger down towards Tassie. But they all had coral reefs on them and nice looking coral reef facies from the bit that came up in the dredges. But those reefs would have formed at latitudes closer to Tasmania than even to Brisbane. Never mind up here where you have the modern Great Barrier Reef. They were forming really high latitude, you know, 40 degrees and things like that. So we're quite keen on understanding those. They were probably 15 to 20 million years old but I don't have firm dates on those yet. It's a little harder to date things at that particular age. But coral reefs have done different and crazy things at different times. Depending on what climate was doing and what the world was like, circulation, there's so many different, you know, variables. And of course, your record of the rocks, you just may not have them. You know, if we hadn't dredged those, we wouldn't know that those were there. Right. So when there were periods when there were less corals, what was the main drivers of the... We don't know yet. Yeah, we just don't know. We don't understand why, you know, during the Maya scene, you would have had such a greater latitudinal range for some of these corals. Maybe some of them are happier in cooler water or maybe it was a lot warmer. But, you know, we don't know. What would you say is the most interesting scientific questions in your field at the moment? Oh, gosh. I would almost be cynical and say, whatever you have money to study. The problem is it's all so good. That's the shocker. We know so little. Everything is important. I mean, there's so many things. I think at the moment I really would like to provide more and better integrated data for paleoclimate through the last thousands of years because the need for that to inform management today is really critical, you know, as a environmentally, I guess, when you say jaded person, I would really like to see something survive on this planet past human beings. And of course, I'm not sure there's anything we can do to really manage resources on a resource by resource basis. I think we need to think a little bit more about population control from a human point of view. That seems so unpopular now and where we've got people in charge of the world who seem to say, growth, growth, growth, bigger population, buy more white goods.  Everyone is responsible for these problems. I'm often amazed environmentalist mates of mine are saying, oh, we've got to stop mining coal. And you just have to say, mate, we're not burning it and turning it into electricity because those nasty miners mined it, you know. They're mining it because we want the lights to come on. And that's the same with every resource. It's all what we're using, you know. And the more of us there are, especially with developing nations who want to have some quality of life, here we are extravagant, you know, Western quality of life, giant energy use, giant use of all kinds of just materials.  You guys can't have any, you know. But we've been terribly ineffective at getting populations to cut down on their use of energy and to cut down on their use of things. What do you do? What we've got to do is try to have fewer people because everybody needs a certain amount. And it, you know, you can have some renewable energy, you can have some of this, you can have some of that. But the resources we use come from the earth, the food we eat. I mean, people complain about mining. Get on Google Earth, find a mine. Go to Gooniela, it's gigantic. It's a huge coal mine.  Almost all the environmental damage there, it's done by agriculture because we want to eat, not by that little tiny mine there. And so I think we have to focus our environmentalism on the problem and it's us. We're the problem. That my problem as a scientist is I see everything we're trying to do are stitching the corner of a bandaid that's coming off and the problem needs sutures of the giant wound that goes out of sight of your bandaid. We're not, you know, if we're gonna do something useful we've got to address bigger things than the small environmental issues that get all the, well not all the press but so much of the press. We've got to have fewer of us so we need less of all this stuff because we're not disciplined enough to be good environmentalists and useless. Maybe I'm cynical but I don't see the world all of a sudden saying I'm gonna bicycle to work and by the way if that bicycle has a titanium frame that's a big mine or a bunch of sand mining on Fraser Island to get that titanium. It didn't drop from the sky without resources.  This is a bit of a change of pace but I'd be interested in hearing how you got into your area of research. What was your journey to where you are now? Well I'm a paleontologist and interestingly my dad was a geologist and my mom was a biologist but what really got me was your college textbooks. Ralph books bombs, animals without backbones was on their shelf and I would look through that book long before I could read and it had crabs and worms and corals and these things and then my dad he had shock and twin hopefuls principles of invertebrate paleontology. That Honest of Goodness is the first book I ever read cover to cover by choice. That wasn't C-Spot Run, blah blah, school books that, you know, in school. That was, I wanted to know what are all those cool things trilobites, brachypods, what are all these cool things in this book and of course my mom and dad could tell me and so I fell into paleontology as a love. When I was knee high, I mean I couldn't help it. I wanted to know what all those cool things and those pictures in those books were and so I'm a fortunate individual. I aim toward this career from the time I was six years old. I've only ever wanted to do this and now I study rocks that are made by organisms and that's paleontology and as much as modern coral reefs are beautiful ecology with corals and fish, I can assure you a coral reef is a rock and it's a big rock that sticks up and can withstand waves bashing on it and it has a thin little film of biology on top of it but it is that biology that constructed it but the reef itself is a rock. It's mine, I mean it's what I do. All these biologists think the reef is theirs. No, the reef is for geologists because almost all of it is geology but of course it's the geology made by biology which is perfect. It's what nature can do. Do you have any thoughts on what scientists can do to better educate the public about climate change and about science in general? You know I think scientists need to, it's a difficult thing, there's so few scientists. I mean we've got more scientists now than we've ever had. A lot of scientists are solving industry type problems and so forth but you know we have more environmental scientists than we've ever had but there's so few of us considering how much environment there is to study and considering the uncertainties and what we do and don't know. We feel overwhelmed and I can't speak for everybody by any means and I wouldn't want to and I can assure you a lot of my colleagues wouldn't want me speaking for them but the point is we feel like my God how are we gonna figure all this out? We've got so much to do and it's so expensive and it's so hard and we need more students, we need more of this. So a lot of people just oh I don't have time to talk to the media, I don't have time to talk to people. I think the education side is so critical and I teach undergraduate, I teach first year, second year and third year courses in the School of Earth Sciences and yeah I resent marking and I resent the bureaucracy and the admin, you know I can't help it. I want to be doing this, I want to be doing the research but I take my education side seriously with my students, these are the guys who are gonna solve the things I'm not smart enough to solve. I hope to goodness I can inspire someone who's smarter than me to come out and make sense of some of this stuff that I look at and think oh my God there's so many variables here, how can we constrain this? At what level is anything we're looking at here gonna be useful? I often feel like that. You look at the heterogeneity on a reef, here you've got this, there you've got that, come back two years later, oh goodness that's gone now, you've got something else there, now you've got this. The longer you come here, the more you realize how difficult the problem is and you think oh we're gonna have to average all of that out over a different time interval and a different spatial level and we're gonna have to do all this and it just gets harder and harder and so if we could get people to know more and from a political point of view, people just need to be educated to be in democracies. You need to know, you can't afford to not know when you're voting on things that are important and so public education is critical but it's hard to do and there's so little trust now too there's a weird undercurrent in society that they blame scientists for a lot of the problems because scientists develop nuclear weapons and so scientists fault and you get an undercurrent of that and often now there's a trust thing, they say oh these guys are just trying to destroy my economy with climate change stuff, I don't believe them and then oh there's the climate deniers, I don't believe them. You have polarized science, we need to have scientists who can talk about data and uncertainties and say look I don't know the answer and we don't know so many of them. We may know something but we often can't answer what the public wants, they just say give me an answer, should we do this or that? Often in science we say well probability is, maybe you should, you know. Trying to convince people and educate people when that's the best you can do is pretty difficult and I think a lot of my colleagues are a bit jaded from it and just don't even wanna try sometimes but having the opportunities difficult at the same time and making that time. So would you say your approach is inspiring the next generation who you hope will solve the problem? You know, I wouldn't like to say that's my approach because I have little control over it. I would be thrilled to death if I could die having inspired some guys to carry on who did better than I did with these issues, you know. And my graduate students who I've turned out in the past, I love to see them. I've got some who are doing wonderful science and it's what I'm proud of and all my students. I've got students in industry too and I've got students in all kinds of areas. That's what turns me on in so many ways but in the end I wanna know and I don't care if it's a guy I had in first year who figures it out and says, oh, by the way, I figured this out. I'm gonna say, oh, I wanted to know before I up in Karkat, I wanna know. The more people who are working on what I wanna know, the happier I'm gonna be but we'll never have enough. One last question. Could you give a short statement just about the topic of how humans are influencing our climate perhaps from your perspective or from your research? Well, from my research, it's a little harder to say from the viewpoint that I'm trying to get before the influence was as big as it is now.  You can measure it yourself. It's empirical, you know, CO2 is going up. It always gets trickier from their greenhouse gases or pure physics, they have to make it warmer. There's just no question about it, it's physics. You can't argue with maths and most people don't know enough to try. Obviously, this is anthropogenic. The worst thing is just ecosystem destruction that you can see. It's empirical like that Google Earth. Go look at what ecosystems are gone due to agriculture, for instance. And I mean, what are you gonna say? Well, we just won't eat. We have to eat. But look at the fisheries, you know. And mind you, there's a lot of export fisheries and whatever, but in the end, fisheries are about people eating. And trying to figure out how coral reefs can provide the services they do, provide the food they do, to communities who depend on them for their food without destroying the reef, like so many in the Caribbean, where they eat fish that are, you know, five centimeters long, because that's the biggest fish they can catch now.  I mean, there's no question about that. And the bigger the population, the bigger the footprint, because each one of us has a footprint. We each burn a bit of coal. We each use a bit of aluminium. We each use plastic, you know, for all the hatred of oil companies. You can buy a liter of water, costs more than a liter of petrol. And it didn't cost as much to produce as that petrol.  They don't produce it and twist your arm to buy it. They'll stop as soon as you stop using petrol. But then in plastics, you know, what would we do? Stuff comes out of a petroleum well. You'd be amazed at what you depend on comes out of a petroleum well. It's not just petrol. So it's people, it's empirical. And it all adds up.


Today, we're opening a massive collection box. What's up, guys? We're back with another epic video. Today, I'm going to be opening up two different collections that I bought. One is sealed product and one is single cards. But first, we have a giveaway. I'll be giving away these three cards of Perfect Machine Game, Reflect Bounder and Darker Necrophere.  Let me know if you prefer singles or sealed product. I think that'll be interesting to see in the comments. So first off, we are going to start with the small singles binder that I got from a viewer. So let's see what is inside. I don't really remember. I remember it was a few nice cards. It was like a low amount of cards, but they were very quality. So quantity, low, quality, high. Okay, let's see what was inside. So, oh, here we go. These were from John Gebath. That's his IG. Let's see. He has about 1,875. What his, uh, his estimate is. Let's see what is in here. I think there's some ultimate rares and stuff. So inside we have the destroyer source. I always really like the artwork on this card. That guy's from Power of the Duelist. That's really cool. Master Hyperion. Ooh, a glow-up bulb. This is a cool card. Let's see about this one. You've got ourselves an ulti glow-up bulb, which is pretty cool for like Edison format and things like that. Very nice card in there. We also have the Thunder King Ryo. That is an epic ultimate rare. Very cool card. Of course, the Neospatian Grand Mall is a classic as well. You love to see that. And the dandelion up there is also really cool.  We've got a BLS ulti right here. This is an OCG card, BLS. Let's check this out. That card looks incredible. I mean, it's not in fantastic shape. As you guys can see, it's a little bit, a little scratched up, but that is a really cool card to run like a goat deck. This would be really, really cool. Then there's an honest up there. We have an Element of Hero Stratus ulti. We already do have one of these. We can get closer to the play set. We've got a Nios, Elise, Ultimate Rare. One of some really cool stuff like Edison in here, which I've mentioned Edison a few times because I played it a couple of times recently. It's been really fun. We have a Swap Frog ulti. That's cool. Ooh, a Treeborn Frog ulti. That's a first add. I think I have an Unlim in my deck, so I don't want to switch that one up. Ooh, wow, Exodia. There's the Unlimited Reprint versus the Ultimate Rare. The Ultimate Rare looks so much better. Then we have some Limbs. Those look like maybe some of them are... That one might not be a reprint. Some of them, most of them are reprints. Yeah, that's a reprint. Okay, that's a reprint. That's a reprint. I think maybe the left arm is not. That's pretty cool. Oh, man. Ulti Stardust and Black Rose. Wow. Okay, these are kind of overlapping. Let's be careful here. So there's a first-ed Ulti Stardust Dragon from the Duelist Genesis. I love to see these cards. I don't think these were in amazing shape. I can't really remember. Oh, wow. Maybe they are in amazing shape. This card looks good. I mean, it has a few things at the top, but honestly, this is lightly played at the worst, I would say. Very nice card. Then, of course, the Black Rose. There's the Goyo. Is that first-edition? Oh, that is amazing. A first-edition Ultimate Rare. Ally of Justice. Catastore. That's another very cool card. That's a Turbo Pack, so it doesn't come in first-ed. Gaga Cowboys. Always a classic. Leviere, the Sea Dragon. That's a very expensive card, actually. Castell and, of course, the number 101 Silent Honor Arc. And is that it? I think that's it. Yeah, so it's pretty low. I mean, they're not a lot of cards, but they're all pretty valuable. Next up, we have two different boxes with sealed items inside. So let's see what there are. All right. The first item, this looks like it's going to be matte. So this is going to be a little bit difficult to show. So this one, I don't know really where these came from. So this looks like, I don't know, just some sort of... Are these light swarms, maybe? I don't know. That might be the light sworn mat. Then we have a Dark Magician Girl mat.  And then we have a very large mat. This one's like...  Okay, wait. There's one of these like little mouse pad ones called the Eternity Code one. I don't really know what they call these.  And then a massive Cyber Dragon one that's just completely huge. And I can't show the whole thing. Here we go. Maybe this is a better look at the other half. So it's a very large mat. And then we have the large box with sealed product inside. First off, we have a monster. What is this? Mega Deck Box? This is actually insane. Look how long this thing is. This is like a foot of Deck Box. This is really cool. It holds five full-size decks. Okay, that's a good start. Then we have one, two, three, four, and five Photon Shockwave First Edition blisters. So those are really nice. Oh, and we have a note here. Okay, so let's see what is inside the note. Hey, Rucks. Thanks for helping me out. I appreciate a lot. Keep up with the amazing content. Love watching them when I'm winding down for the day. Enjoy the collection. Toe and A.K. Toe and Fo Show. You guys have probably heard them before. On the outro credit when we're, you know, shouting everybody out. All right. So he sent us some cool stuff. So it looks like for the community, that will be added to the giveaway. So let's see what is for the community, guys. Looks like a pack. We have a giveaway. Is this the movie pack with Shining Dragon? Is that what this is? Oh, Rigecky. Okay. Yeah, the movie pack. That's awesome. Then we have a Rigecky, Blue Eyes, White Dragon, Blue Eyes, Shining Dragon, Blue Eyes, White Dragon, and Blue Eyes, White Dragon. Four Blue Eyes and Rigecky. Not bad. So all this will be out of the giveaway. So make sure you guys enter that, liking the video, subscribing. Let me know what you prefer, sealed or single cards. And here we have one for me, which is pretty cool. And this seems like a CGC slab from what I can tell. I'm going to guess CGC slab. I'm going to have to rip this thing. If the tape is making it difficult. Uh-oh, guys.  It's Pokemon. Then we have a Storming Wind promo. Elemental Hero Thunder. What is this? Is that Mattel and Bacanum Oath? Wait, is this Mattel card? So it looks like this is a Mattel promo card, which is actually pretty awesome. That is really, really cool. Thanks so much, Toan. That is actually a very unique card. I don't think I own this. Then we have the Charizard GX CGC 8.5. I have like a few CGC cards from you guys now at this point. Maybe at one point we'll actually send some cards to them and see what happens. But I have like several cards now. So thanks a lot, dude. Okay, here we have a bunch of single packs, which is pretty cool. Oh, this would make a fun video just to open all of these up. We have Rise of Destiny. Two of those. Secrets of Eternity. Cross Souls. This is weird to hold this way. We got two Cross Souls. We've got two new challengers. Extreme, three of those. Three Extreme Victory. We've got two Absolute Power Force. Three Storm of Ragnarok. We've got one of the Old Generation Force, Poor Generation Force. We've got one of the first edition Ancient Prophecy. Those are actually pretty rare. We have a Blue Eyes White Dragon. That is a Konami logo. Red Konami logo. So that's like a 2003, 2004 pack. 2019 Gold Star. We've pulled your goon. That'd be insane. We've got another Movie Pack. Or two of those, but she gave away to one of you guys. Turbo packs here. We've got Tournament Pack 15. We've got Tournament Pack 14. Tournament Pack 13. Two OTS-1 and two Speed Duel Tournament Pack 1. So that's a lot of decent single packs. And that's not all. We've got a lot more left. We have a special edition from Storm of Ragnarok. We've got a Chaos Impact first edition booster box. We've got some pretty good luck with this set. Maybe we could do it again. Who knows? And if you thought that was it, there's way more to come. We have more blister packs. Here's some really cool ones. The Duelist Genesis. Yeah, and a 499 tag on it. Yeah, that is pretty insane. Rise of the Duelist. Not one. Not two. Okay, I'm not going to count all of them, but I think we have... Well, we will count, but not out loud. We've got 10 of these. Rise of the Duelist. One of the best sets of 2020 and maybe ever. Just an insane set. That's going to be fun to open those. And then we have, of course, Battles of Legend Armageddon. We opened a few of those packs back in the day. Don't worry. There's more blisters. We have more Armageddon. Yes, more Armageddon. More chances for 10K Dragon. Kings Court. There's some of those. Maybe we can pull the God card. We could pull Collector Rares. There's Legendary Duelist. Rage of Raw for that. There's Ghost Rares. You guys know we want to get those. A few more of those. More chances at the Ghost. We've pulled it a couple of times, but it's still fun every time. And then Extreme Force First Edition. Not a lot to say about this one, really, but it's cool. And then, of course, the Eternity Code. Some of the best sets ever here. We got Eternity Code, Rise of the Duelist. You know, just some good stuff. Here's something I've never opened, which is an entire Invasion of... Not Invasion of Chaos. It's a different set. Invasion, Vengeance, Special Edition. Invasion of Chaos would be cooler, but this is still really cool. Special or Super Special Variant Cards. Let me move that. There we go right there. So in here, I think, like, starting Good Infusion Dragon is the cover card. So I don't remember what all is in here. Well, look, here are the promos. We can get the... Is that the Relling Caribo over there? Anything else? Any good? The little... The pug guy. Yeah, so pretty cool. Then we have a ton of sleeves. So this is pretty awesome. Mini Character Sleeves. So very nice. Always nice to have more sleeve to sleeve stuff up when you ship and when you make decks and stuff. And then we have a Rise of Destiny First Edition box. Yeah, Rise of Destiny First Edition. That's pretty cool. I don't remember if it's a hobby or retail, but we will show it right there. We'll figure that out afterwards. Another booster box of Rise of Destiny is always awesome. We got ourselves some... Wait, some Rush Duel, I should say. Promos. Pretty cool in there. So those are sealed up. That's... I think that might be the Dark Magician Girl and the Pot of Greed and all that stuff. Then we have a... Somewhat Sealed. It's a little bit opened. This is the Starter Deck Blue Eyes one. Saga of the Blue Eyes by Dragon or something like that. Here's a really cool product that I've never opened. The Speed Duel Battle City. They're actually coming out with a GX one soon. So this is pretty cool. And we have not one, but two. It's eight complete decks inside. And then there's some random Secret Rare promos. So these are actually super fun if you just want to play a little bit of Speed Duel with your friends. So that is pretty exciting to get those as well. We are finally nearing the end. In here we have a Duel Terminal 6. So this is the one with the Dark Magician Girl inside. Is it sealed? No, it's not sealed. Okay. So in here, let's just... We can just go through this real quick. So this is the way they would send these like for everyone with the Duel Terminals. They send them in these big boxes. And literally all the cards are just like in here. So the ones you would pull would just kind of go in order like this. So you got all this, the Gem Knight. Is that a rare, I guess? There's a super rare. That's cool. So we got to find the Dark Magician Girl, of course. Unless this has been like, you know, pulled out or something. Macro Cosmos, cool. Oh, there it is. The Dark Magician Girl. So this is the big card of the set. Pretty crazy. It's just like a stack of like the cards that would come out of the Duel Terminal. It's weird. And the final couple items we have, we do have a Infinity Chasers booster box, which is actually kind of a cool set. I like a lot of the cards in here. And then we have to finish it out. Of course, one of our favorite product, the Monster Box. So we will definitely be opening this one on the channel. A ton of this stuff on the channel soon. So if you guys want to see anything in this video open on the channel, make sure you let me know in the comments what you want to see the most. I'll try and get that into a video soon. Hope you guys enjoyed this collection purchase because this was a lot of sealed stuff. So a lot of really cool singles. If you didn't make sure to subscribe to the channel for more epic content like this in the future. Shout out to TCG Trust Guard's Tomefo Show, Tomato Juice, Stanley, Mike, Nance, Mimic, Echo, Spanky Bitfarer, the G-Raider, Daxter, Ian Musa, and Junior Barting. Thank you guys for supporting the channel. And I'll see you guys next time. Peace.


So obviously the Papa John's this week. We're in the canteen doing a piece of toppings Yeah, straight away. They are the Derby of the Premier League Get them out of there. 14 points Hunter is straight in there bacon. I Don't I've never had it on pizza. I don't mind it. I reckon Plays my table Yeah, smoked bacon crispy Going to New Yorkers, yeah Basil goes on most pieces. It goes on most pieces, but do you know it's that never? Me table Religation battle. I've put it in a relegation battle Just Really taste it bell peppers It's spicy So do you like them some of them?  I'll do like it. I reckon chicken and bacon. You've got to be the same in all those. Yeah, yeah For that I should go and champion just for that. I bang them.  Don't give me that garlics I reckon garlics play off to me You've got me I have garlic on everything. I missus pushes it in everything Yeah, that's high though for garlic. We'll put it in there. Somebody's going to play off, don't they? Um, I reckon that's up there. Yeah, I don't mind putting it in playoffs Unless you think those waters no banging playoffs, you're right Jalapeno is not for me at all. No, not do it for me either.  Jalapeno chips I reckon One of the bottom two in it Reliation battle. We'll put it in the bottle Go do it for me. Oh, now we're talking. Meeple. A meeple. I like a meeple on a peeple. It's Jamie Walker I think Oh Mike's surely Yeah, yeah, it's got to be in it right up there. This is a tricky one the next one You know, I don't like mushrooms. I love mushrooms. See this is where you know what? I don't know why I like mushrooms because they don't have any taste whatsoever. They have like they're a bit rubbery as well Yeah, I Don't eat them. So I I'm out of this one. Um, I think Just because you like them and no, I like them. You don't I'll put them in the table. Yeah, I Can understand why people don't like them, but I like them Olives again, not for me. That's not getting me getting me to get over this getting really good Onions, Japanese. Yeah, I do. I am not really on a pizza that I Hate Goat yeah, that's the goat champions. Yeah Debatable on this. No, don't even tell me it's the baby. No, because don't tell me it's debatable It's not for me. No, don't tell me but I know a few people have it. It's not debatable Get out. I'll believe that should be even worse than relegated Pineapples get it gone get it gone. No fruit should be on save it. All right. No fruit should be on the pieces Plain I don't mind it. I'm happy. I don't mind the pizza. Oh, it's a safe bet, isn't it? Yeah I was Yeah, yeah, I was gonna put me a table will play off sitting off playoffs is probably right I think there's a lot of people's like I think it's safe option It's an overachiever definitely Sausage mind a sausage on a pizza Like sausage, you know, I do like sausage again. I'm like spicy sausage. I treat seven True it's I don't think I'd have treats on a pizza like but you can get over spicy sausages I'm happy to put it up there. Don't think I don't think it's champion worthy. No, I think probably playoffs as well Yeah If you want to add it well Spinach Not for me. Do you like spinach? I do. Yeah. Yeah, I do like spinach You like spinach? Yeah, but for me it goes relegation about on the pizza. Not on a pizza, but on On a piece of relegation about it's gonna fall I don't think you can relegate it but it can be in the battle It's relegated it for me for me a spinach on a pizza is relegated. It's only chance. We've done it off and off Hover it there Let it survive on the last day not Go on put it where you want to put I'm gonna let it survive on the last day spinach Steak I Like state, but I don't like that. I wouldn't hit yeah It should be its own thing.  Yeah No, that'd be the last thing I'll order a steak Chewy steak on top of your pizza Medium rare on your pizza Did he even ask you? No, I don't ask you for steak today. I've never asked for it on a pizza They're all They're just rare I'm looking I reckon it's I think it's mid-table relegation battle. Yeah mid-table. Yeah Smart isn't that unless it's not unless it's Mashed up. Yeah. Oh, so you can't do a pizza without big tomatoes really dirty tomatoes on top of a pizza Like big slimy tomatoes Not for me for a lot of people. They're essential though It's a piece of time. Yeah, tomatoes. They're essential for a patient. You're vegan. What do you mean to miles? Tomatoes are all pizzas on there. Oh Tomatoes on them look at the photo Are you still? Bando! Bando, you're like writing pizza something. Pizzas, rate them Did you just screw up any of them? Let us know Put them in the bin Extra cheese has got to be on the top You can't beat... Mushroom in the bin Spinach in the bin. Garlic bread on your top. Garlic bread's got to go on the top Put it all in the bin I reckon tomatoes Balf. No, it's not a battle actually. Mid-table. No Religated. Tomatoes relegated. Religated, yeah That photo look at that photo if we're off tomatoes off that photo relegated if we're getting like mashed up tomatoes as a base with cheese on. Yeah, then it has this essential Yeah, it's essential. If it's tomatoes like that, I agree. If it's mashed up tomatoes, it's champions Yeah, it does. Yeah, I'll see you later.  I think relegated speak for itself. A lot of people would agree on that Tomatoes up in the air Your relegation battle They're just there. I wouldn't have them. Basil I guess goes on most but you don't taste it In the autos Bacon extra cheese was controversial that could have gone champions to be fair and Meatball and bacon. Good additions to the pizza Playoffs again garlic. If we're talking garlic bread that goes champions for me, but on a pizza Added with the other toppings float around the playoffs Ham Yeah, it's a nicely plain. I think it's underrated and sausage Yeah, like we said like depends what type of sausage it is but Goes nicely on a pizza and then the mid-table ones Can go up and down depends on person now and what they what they fancy really. Yeah. Yeah My summary of the top pizza toppings