Trinity Hall Research Fellow, Dr Emma Kast, discusses her work on Paleoclimatology. Paleoclimatology is the study of Earth’s climate in the past. By examining Earth’s history, we can gain insights into how the Earth system works while providing context for modern climate change.
What has Earth’s climate been like in the past and how has it changed? How do we know? We will take a broad look at these fundamental questions with a focus on the Cenozoic era, the last 66 million years of Earth’s history. During the Cenozoic there were periods of dramatic warmth, millions of years of long-term cooling and drying, and the onset of ice ages. These large-scale climate changes likely affect other properties of the Earth system, such as ocean chemistry and biology. In the latter part of this webinar, we will turn to a topic of current research and explore how ocean oxygen and nutrient cycling have changed over the Cenozoic and are unexpectedly disconnected from global climate.
