Thursday, February 23, 2012

Week 6+: The data

Good luck with your ice core data projects this weekend.  Let us know if you run into problems.  The point is to learn how to deal with and look at real data from one of our climate proxies, in this case, ice!  Some banging of the head against the wall is required, but if you start getting a headache contact us, post on the blog, contact classmates and hopefully we can have some fun with this.

The assignment, figure of Vostok del18O periodicities that we discussed at the end of class and the code that generated said figure are all up on the class wiki.

Cheers (with plenty of ice in your glass),

Bekah

P.S. Very relevant CLIMATE LECTURE: Dr. Stephen Pekar of Queens College, "Past Climate Changes in Antarctica: Looking Back to Our Future"  Friday February 24, 2012, 2 pm, Northrop Hall Rm 122

Monday, February 20, 2012

Week 6 - Ice Cores

Lucky you - this week we have no preliminary reading for the lecture.

Last week's work with ocean cores will help immensely.  Keep in mind everything you learned about oxygen isotopes.  They are coming back to haunt you again this week!  Bring along your laptops for lecture as we will begin working on our ice core project during Tuesday's lecture. See you in class.

Monday, February 13, 2012

Week 5 - Deep Sea Cores

The article for this week is:
Bohaty, Steven M. and James C. Zachos. 2003. Significant Southern Ocean warming event in the late middle Eocene. Geology 31:1017-1020.

As you're reading this paper, try to keep the QuALMRI format in mind. What is the question for this paper? What inferences does it make? etc. Some other questions to think about are:

What important assumption is made in the oxygen isotope analysis of this paper? Do you think it's appropriate?

This paper includes an analysis of carbon isotopes, which we haven't talked about yet. Why do you think these researchers were interested in carbon isotopes? What did they learn from them?

What implications does this study have for the climate change event we are currently experiencing?

What research would you like to do to evaluate the results of this study?

Friday, February 3, 2012

Week 4 - Stable Isotope Introduction and Oxygen Isotopes

Hi folks! Great to see some people already getting psyched about isotopes!  The reading for this week is: 

Ehleringer JR, Bowen GJ, Chesson LA, West AG, Podlesak DW, and Cerling_ TE. 2008. Hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios in human hair are related to geography. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105(8):2788–2793.

For this week’s discussion, here are some questions you may want to think about:

1)      How did the author’s parameterize their model? Given the ‘effects’ we talked about in class, are their model results what we would expect?
2)      Do you think the model was effective? Why?
3)      How can we apply this model to other fields, such as forensics?

Happy reading!