QUATERNARY PALEOENVIRONMENTAL AND PALEOCLIMATE STUDIES
at the Department of Geology,
Colby College
GE372 Students click HERE to download a pollen count sheet in Microsoft Excel, for use in the lab project in the latter part of the semester. (Note that there is a "1" for an unnamed taxon in this spread sheet; this is solely to avoid an error message in the percent column, generated by dividing by zero. It should be deleted from your counts.)
Studies of Quaternary environments, those of roughly the last two million years of Earth history, are increasingly important as we struggle to understand the scale and rapidity of climatic and environmental changes in the modern world. How can we say, for example, that human activities are having major impacts on global climates if we can't say for sure what the natural rate of variability in those climate systems is? Colby students are introduced to techniques in Quaternary Paleoecology through a course ( ) that is required for Geology-Biology majors but open to all students meeting the prerequisites. In this course, students learn to identify some of the more important non-marine fossil groups that provide useful data to help us re-create what past environments must have been like, and from that information to approximate what past climatic parameters must have determined that biological environment. The study of palynomorphs (pollen grains) in sediments is one way that past vegetation changes can be assessed. Above, Colby students are shown preparing to study and sample a river-bluff exposure of sediments along the Sandy River, about a half-hour drive north of the campus; these samples will provide the basis for subsequent lab work during the semester. At left are pollen grains of bog laurel, a common | |
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