Professor Tim Barrows | UNSW Research

My Expertise

Radiocarbon dating and past climate change

Keywords

radiocarbon dating

climate change

glacial history

Fields of Research (FoR)

Geochronology, Climate change science, Geomorphology and earth surface processes, Glaciology

Biography

I work in past climate change, radiocarbon dating and landscape change. I am the Director of Research at the Chronos Radiocarbon Facility. I graduated with a BSc (first class Honours) from the Australian National University. I received an Australian Postgraduate Award and John Conrad Jaeger Scholarship and completed a PhD at the Research School of Earth Sciences. This also included a semester at the Quaternary Research Center, University of Washington. I spent my first postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado. Subsequently, I spent 5 years as an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow and then as a Research Fellow at the Department of Nuclear Physics, The Australian National University. I lectured at the University of Exeter from 2009 to 2018. I was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in 2017. I held a joint appointment with the University of Portsmouth as Professor of Environmental Change from 2018-2023.

My Grants

2022 Boston, C., Lovell, H, Barrows, T.T, Timing of Pleistocene cirque glaciation in the Simien Mountains, Ethiopia

National Environmental Isotope Facility, UK, £31,435 ($56,000)

2018-2023 PI Barrows. Investigating the controls on the extent of tidewater glaciers (ICETIDE).

Australian Research Council, Future Fellowship. $900,000

2016-2019 CI Quine, T., Barrows, T. T. Hartley, I., and Meersmans, J. University of Exeter. SPECTRA: Soil processes and ecological services in the karst critical zone of southwest China (NE/N007603/1)

Natural Environment Research Council (Newton), £600,824 ($A1.12M)

2011-2014 CI Shulmeister, Barrows and others The last glaciation maximum climate conundrum and environmental responses of the Australian continent to altered climate states. (DP110103081)

Australian Research Council, $527,000

2010-2013 Lead CI Barrows, Pillans Understanding global warming using long-term glacier retreat records. (DP1095053)

Australian Research Council, $160,000

2011-2014 Lead CI Barrows EX-GLACIER (A record of rapid climate-change from the Pyrenees, Spain)

Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant, €100,000 ($A162,000)

2011 Co-CI Mills, and Barrows The impact of the Agulhas Current on the Ice Age climate of the Drakensberg Mountains, South Africa

Royal Geographical Society, Peter Fleming Award, £9,000

2005-2008: Lead CI Barrows, Cosmogenic isotopes in glacial landscapes: climate change and production rates (DP0557143)

Australian Research Council. $290,000

My Qualifications

PhD (Quaternary Geology)

My Research Activities

My research centres on determining how the Earth's surface and climate systems evolve on long time scales. My primary focus is on using geochronology to study how climate change has affected the Earth within the last glacial cycle (about the last 125,000 years). I specialise in the use of cosmogenic nuclides (¹⁴C, ¹⁰Be, ²⁶Al, ³⁶Cl) to provide chronologies for climate records in glacial and periglacial landscapes and to provide ages for the timing of landscape change, such as lake formation and meteor impacts. I also work on developing climate proxy records to estimate climate change from glaciers, lakes and planktonic foraminifera. I am the research lead for the Chronos Radiocarbon Facility in the Mark Wainwright Analytical Centre.