PALEOECOLOGY 442
A long-term perspective on ecology and environmental issues
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Syllabus

Topics

Announcements

This course is offered in the spring semester only, and includes:

Lectures on global climate change, forest history, paleolimnology, ice cores, current environmental issues... Group discussions on mass extinctions, creationism, past human impactson ecosystems, global warming mitigation.... Labs have a strongly hands-on, research-based focus, including: sediment coring, micro- and macro-fossil analysis, tree ring studies, historical weather records,written and oral presentations of project results.

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Top photo: Spring, 2000, class collecting a rod core from Potter Pond, a glacial kettle pond near campus. Under 13 m of water, we collected a meter of organic mud underlain by peat. A radiocarbon date of the mud-peat boundary showed that the lake developed from a bog about 4,000 years ago. Such a large (14 m!) and rapid rise in the local water table over the last few millenia seems surprising, but it is corroborated by a student-dated core from another local bog. **************** Bottom photo: Fossil diatoms from Lake Turkana, Kenya. Viewed at 100X magnification.  Approximate age: 2,000 years. These diatoms represent relatively "salty" conditions, which in turn indicates a relatively arid climate. Four students accompanied me to East Africa in June, 2000, to collect sediment cores from Lake Victoria, using diatoms such as these to reconstruct the last 1000 years of tropical climate change and human impacts on the lake. This project was funded by the National Science Foundation.