The other scientists on this team and I will continue being detectives and collecting data (clues) to unravel the secrets our sediment cores contain about ancient climate change. The sediment cores are like a chapter book containing many clues as to why our planet’s climate changed so dramatically. As you have heard me say before, we will be like time travelers exploring strange past worlds, trying to understand what the climate was like when there were much higher levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Knowing this, we will be able to predict what Earth’s future climate will be like.
For my research, I will be looking at two time intervals (for example, between 13 and 15 and between 23 and 28 million years ago) which are the last two time intervals when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were higher than today. I have requested access to hundreds of the samples we pulled up from the ocean floor. The samples are stored in Germany, so I will travel there to see them in January.
Once I have the samples, my students and I will wash each sample through a sieve, removing the mud-sized sediments and leaving sand-size shells made by one-celled organisms call foraminifers that lived on the sea bottom. We will look through a microscope to find certain species of the foraminiferal shells so we can run them through big scientific machines to collect chemical data. These chemical data can tell us a lot about the climate that occurred tens of millions of years ago.
For example, one of the chemical data sets (called elemental ratios) can tell us what the bottom water temperature was when a shell was formed.
