Anja Scheffers

Biography

Dr Scheffers is the Director of the Southern Cross GeoScience Research Centre and a senior lecturer in the School of Environmental Science and Management.

Research

During her studies of Physical Geography and by a series of accidental turns Dr Scheffers became fascinated to investigate how coastal environments have changed in the past. She is particularly interested in processes that shape and modify coastal landscapes over a variety of length and time scales and the coupling and feedback between such processes, their rates, and their relative roles, especially in the contexts of variation in climatic and tectonic influences and in light of changes due to human impact:

• Understanding past and modern marine physical natural hazards such as tsunamis and storms The development of long-term records of tsunamis/cyclones from geological and biological proxy evidence as well as historical documentary records
• Exploring linkages between Late Quaternary climate and landscape change focusing on past sea level and response of coastal ecosystems, particularly coral reefs
• Quaternary geochronology based on ESR and U-series dating and multi-proxy study of corals Palaeoclimatology
• Geomythology (pairs geological evidence of catastrophic events and reports of such events encoded into the mythological lexicon of ancient societies)