Investigating past climate using cave mineral formations
BU’s Seminar Series on Climate Change
4:00 - 5:00pm CAS 132, 675 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA
Speaker: Corrine Wong
Boston College
Studying past climate provides context for understanding
modern climate variability and provides insights into how future climate
might respond to warming global temperatures. Reconstructing climate from
geologic archives, such as ice cores and tree rings, extends climate
records beyond periods for which there are instrumental measurements and
historical observations. Cave mineral deposits, speleothems, serve as a
powerful archive of terrestrial climate to complement climate information
gleaned from polar, marine, and short-lived archives.
Bio: Climate change is one of society's most pressing challenges.
Understanding how on-going climate change will impact our water resources
requires an intimate understanding of the natural and anthropogenic
processes that influence water availability and water quality. Furthermore,
it is important to characterize the natural variability in these processes
in the past and present. Members of Dr. Wong's research group address such
questions as "What climate processes govern past variability in the
hydroclimate of the Americas?' and "What are the dominant sources and
processes dictating urban water compositions?" To read more about specific
projects, please visit our Research page.
This program is supported in part by a grant to Earth & Environment Professor Dave Marchant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute through the Science Education Program.
