We are please to welcome our newest Ph.D. student to the lab, Madison Rafter!
Madison will be working on clumped isotopes in the Baringo, Basin Kenya to reconstruct paleotemperatures during the Plio-Pleistocene among other things. We are really excited to have her join us!
Congratulations to Nicky Arellano who passed her qualifying exams and defended her dissertation proposal this week! She did a great job and we are really looking forward to all the triple oxygen isotope data that will come out of her research on modern rainfall in Panama and Texas.
Our research using scientific drill cores to understand how changes in climate might have affected the evolution humans was spotlighted in American Scientist this week. Read more about the work Kevin and I are doing on this project here!
Congratulations to Nicky Arellano, who was one of three PhD in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences to win an inaugural student research award. She won $2000 for her proposal “Characterization of Triple Oxygen Isotopes in Panama to Understand Precipitation Dynamics.”
Congratulations again Nicky! You can read more about the award here.
I am so excited to say that Bill Lukens and I were award an NSF from Paleo Perspectives on Climate Change to continue our work in eastern Africa as part of the Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project. I am looking for a PhD student to join this project to work on the clumped isotopes, starting in Fall 2021! We will be working in the Baringo Basin, located here in central Kenya.
You can read more about the project below:
The East African Monsoon (EAM) provides intense, seasonal rains that are critically linked to food security and infrastructure for a large portion of global population. The timing and amount of these rains are projected to change substantially under anthropogenic climate change. Studying past intervals of global warmth can inform the scientific community and general public on the direction and magnitude of change in EAM characteristics as the planet warms and cools. This project aims to leverage a large archive of fossil soil (paleosol) samples collected from the Baringo Basin of Kenya, Africa, to reconstruct aspects of past hydroclimate and temperature during the Pliocene-Pleistocene epochs (~4.1-2.6 million years ago). This work will produce the first quantitative estimates of precipitation and temperature across intervals of warming and cooling, including the last time that atmospheric CO2 reached current levels. The response of vegetation to these climate changes will be also be documented, thereby informing the scientific community on the sensitivity of different plant groups to changes in climate parameters. This work will support a large cohort of undergraduate student researchers and a PhD student, and scientific results will be incorporated into upper level, data-driven geoscience courses.
Paleosols were previously described in the field in the vicinity of a coring locality associated with the Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project. New analyses will include reconstructing paleoclimate (rainfall, temperature) using robust, multivariate models based on paleosol bulk geochemistry as well as the clumped isotope composition of pedogenic carbonates; vegetation will be reconstructed using stable isotopes from pedogenic carbonates and organic matter. This work will provide the first quantitative paleoclimate estimates from the Baringo Basin, which contains the most continuous Neogene stratigraphic record in equatorial eastern Africa and preserves a rich paleontological and paleoanthropological archive. The results of this work will be placed within an existing, high-resolution geochronologic framework to test hypotheses that relate the effect of CO2 rise to EAM strength, local climate seasonality, and landscape-scale vegetation structure. The project will include outcrop-to-core comparisons to evaluate proxy robustness, thereby strengthening paleoclimate and paleoenvironmental interpretations. The multi-proxy approach will allow for rigorous testing of proxy robustness and repeatability.
Recently, I got the chance to present my research as part of the Assistant Professors Excellence Lecture Series at the University of Houston. Once of the nice things, well, really the only nice thing about things still being primarily virtual is that I get to share my research with a wider audience as everything is videoed now. Check it out below!
Soils are an integral part of our modern lives – supplying our food and controlling many global biogeochemical cycles. In my research, I study the chemistries of modern soils to better understand the biogeochemical cycles affecting modern humans, but also to understand the evolution of our species, Homo sapiens, and the evolution and extinction of our close relatives known as hominins. My research focuses on soils that are hundreds of thousands to millions of years old and have since been buried beneath the earth’s surface. These buried soils of the past – called paleosols – are where we find many hominin fossils and stone tools. We can apply what we know about modern soils to these paleosols to provide snapshots of past landscapes used by our ancestors. The geochemical data from these paleosols provide us information about past climates and environments, such as temperature, precipitation, and vegetation that we can use to reconstruct these snapshots. We know that climate changes have likely driven hominin adaptations and extinctions, but over such long time scales there is much debate over the timing and importance of events. With these soils of the past, I seek to illuminate the role of climate history in the evolution of our own species.
Andrew Flynn will be presenting his preliminary work on the San Juan Basin in the Paleoclimatology/Paleoceanography Session on Sunday morning. Stop by and check it out if you’re in Portland!
I’ll be hanging out a lot in this Miocene session where my colleague Bill Lukens from James Madison University is presenting our work on clumped isotopes from the Miocene in Kenya.
Kevin, elated after finding a pristine outcrop of fossil soils in Gona, Ethiopia.
Congratulations to Kevin, who received not one but two grants last month! He received $1000 from LacCore at the National Lacustrine Corre Facility at the University of Minnesota to support travel to collect samples from two cores that are stored at the facility from northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia. His dissertation focuses on two cores from the Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project. Kevin also received $2500 from the Geological Society of America that will support the bulk geochemical analyses he needs to properly study all those paleosols he’s been identifying in these cores.
This support will help him reconstruct the paleoclimate during the Plio-Pleistocene during some key intervals in human evolution. Kevin is the newest member of our group and joined us in January 2021, but he’s off to a great start!
Congratulations to Laura Taylor who successfully defended her senior honors thesis today on the “Stable Isotopes of Macrofossils and Bulk Carbonates from the Late Miocene to Pleistocene Santa Rosalía Basin, Baja California Sur, Mexico.” Laura did a great job and we look forward to seeing great things from her in the future in graduate school!
Last week was my first remote conference. GSA made the best of it, but I will be glad when we go back to normal. Recording these talks is hard work, but the benefit is that I get to share my science on here! Take a look below:
New research out from the lab is out now in Science Advances! Dr. Beverly has been working with scientists from the Smithsonian for a number of years on a core that was collected near the famous archaeological site called Olorgesailie. Her part in the research focused on understand the paleosols discovered in the core. You can read more about it in National Geographic or on the UH website.
Nicky’s first paper based on her master’s research in Panama was published today! Check out her research published in the Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies. Nicky is continuing her work on stable water isotopes in Central America for her Ph.D. and we are working on setting up monitoring systems in Panama to collect additional water samples and a new method, triple oxygen isotopes.
Congratulations to Nicky Arellano for her GSA grant to fund her fieldwork in Panama! She received $2500 to support her research using stable water isotopes, including the triple oxygen isotope system, as hydrological tracers to study precipitation formation and inform climate modeling efforts in the Central America region. You can read more about it on the department website here!
