Monitoring landscape evolution of the Joulni Lunette at Lake Mungo, Australia
Abstract
The Willandra Lakes Region World Heritage Area is located on the southeast fringe of Australia's desert core. Although now dry, at intervals in the past when temperature and evaporation were reduced significantly, the lakes were filled with water that flowed from the southeast Australian highlands. The lunettes that built up around the eastern margins of the lakes preserve a long depositional sequence that preserves a history of past human settlement and its palaeoenvironmental context. The Lake Mungo lunette is the best-studied of these. Its southern tip, known as Joulni, is famous for the preserving the oldest-known human remains in Australia, which are also the world's oldest-known ritual human burials. It also preserves traces of past human activity spanning the last 50,000 years, including fireplaces, food remains and stone, bone and shell tools. There is longstanding interest in exploring the relationship between changes in human activity and palaeoenvironmental shifts. However, many of the details of the pivotal human and environmental events at Joulni remain unresolved, and the issue of their resolution has now reached crisis point. Since the late 1970s, the evidence accumulated over millennia has been rapidly denuded by erosion, resulting in the loss of more than a metre of sediment from the ground surface at Joulni. This dramatic loss threatens the future integrity of Australia's most famous archaeological site and will, if unchecked, erase all remaining traces of the First Australians and how they responded to the challenges of living on the edges of the desert as the continent dried out during the last Ice Age.
Since 2015 as part of a project funded by the Australian Research Council (DP150100487) we have been monitoring the ongoing land surface and vegetation evolution of Joulni. Terrestrial Laser Scanning has been used to look at the details of erosion occurring in selected gullies within the Lunette, imagery collected by UAV has been analysed using SfM techniques to construct a time series of 3D models for surface change detection, and high resolution airborne LiDAR has been collected to validate these models. In this presentation, we will examine the ability of these different techniques to accurately measure land surface elevations and monitor multi-scale erosional processes occurring in arid environments.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.G51C0488M
- Keywords:
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- 9805 Instruments useful in three or more fields;
- GENERAL OR MISCELLANEOUSDE: 9820 Techniques applicable in three or more fields;
- GENERAL OR MISCELLANEOUSDE: 1294 Instruments and techniques;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITYDE: 1295 Integrations of techniques;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITY