William Gosling | Ecology of the past

PCRG October

October 31, 2012
WDG

The back end of September and October has been very busy as I have tried to catch up with the teaching, administration and research activity which somewhat accumulated whilst on field work!

Major tasks have been:
1) the marking and coordination for level 3 Geological Record of Environmental Change (S369) module examination,
2) getting used to my new role as Post Graduate Tutor looking after all things related to a doctoral students in the Department of Environment, Earth & Ecosystems, and
3) trying to find time to finish off three manuscripts for submission!

Other members of the lab have also been busy:
* Encarni has arrived from Valenti Rull‘s lab at the Botanical Institute in Barcelona as a NERC Fellow and is settling in to life in Milton Keynes, more details soon…
* Lottie is getting into data analysis and writing up of the Lake Bosumtwi pollen an N isotope data,
* Natalie is writing, crunching numbers and waiting for a machine to be fixed…
* Bryan is working on gelling biogeographic data together in GIS

Imagae of a Toarcian foraminifera taken by Alice Kennedy facilitated by the new cable which allows our microscope camera to talk to a computer – hooray!

* Hayley has been preparing for talking at the Linnean Society palynology meeting on 1st November “Understanding pollen and spore diversity”, and helping “steal” a microtome for sectoning her wood macrofossils,
* Frazer has started to plot Andean and Amazonian midge distributions against temperature, and
* Alice has been taking photos…

In the midst of all this fun I was sent this great video which brightened my day. I hope you enjoy it as well…

Research Fellowships at The Open University

October 26, 2012
WDG

FOUR Research Investment Fellowship
Department of Environment, Earth & Ecosystems
Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space & Astronomical Research
Closing date : 30/11/2012

The four fellowships are advertised in four areas of Earth & Environmental Science; however, applications from exceptional scientists in related fields are also welcome.

For further details visit:
* Earth Science
* Integrated Earth System Modelling
* Terrestrial Ecosystem Science
* Ecosystem Services

If you are interested in any of these posts and want to discuss links to the Palaeoenvironmental Change Research Group please contact William Gosling.

Sediment sampling on the Andean flank, Ecuador

October 10, 2012
HayleyKeen

One of the key goals of the fieldtrip to Ecuador (August-September) was to sample organic and volcanic (tephra) layers from sedimentary exposures with the aim of obtaining new information about past envrionmental change in the region. Our Ecuadorian collaborator, Dr Patricia Mothes (Instituto Geofisico), had identified four of sites she thought might be useful too us: El Fatima Dique, Mera “2” Dique, El Rosol and Vinillos.

At the Fatima site, near Puyo, a thin organic bed was sampled sandwiched between volcanic ash deposits. Wood macrofossils from this deposit have been dated to the last glacial period.

For further descriptions of what we found and field photos read on…

Atlantic control of tropical climate

October 2, 2012
WDG

PUBLISHED:
Nicole A. S. Mosblech, Mark B. Bush, William D. Gosling, David Hodell, Louise Thomas, Peter van Calsteren, Alexander Correa-Metrio, Bryan G. Valencia, Jason Curtis & Robert van Woesik (2012) North Atlantic forcing of Amazonian precipitation during the last ice age. Nature Geoscience, 5: 817-820.

Fieldwork: Papallacta and Cosanga

September 15, 2012
WDG

The second part of our Ecuadorian expedition took in lakes and sections close to the towns of Papallacta and Cosanga. The variation in climatic conditions was marked as we experienced first hand the transition from freezing fog and driving rain to burning sun and heat within a few tens of kilometers as we travelled from >4000 m down to around 1000 m elevation.

Sampling the sedimentary section at Vinillos was hampered by a tropical downpour. Sediments recovered from here include volcanic ash, mud slide deposits including large wood macrofossils and fine grained organic sediments probably deposited in still water environments.

Preparing to recover a short core from a pond near the antenas at Cujuca. Short cores will be used for Chironomid analysis.

Tomorrow we will attempt to recover short cores from two more lakes. Then our final few days here in Ecuador will be spent visiting partners and packing up.

Mera fieldwork continued…

September 8, 2012
WDG

The first half of our field work expedition to Ecuador has now been completed. We had a very successful visit to Mera collecting samples from three new sections and recovered short cores from four lakes.

The sediment sections have yielded many wood macrofossils and samples for pollen analysis. It is anticipated that these will shed light on the nature of tropical vegetation during the last glacial period and before. Some of these samples will be analyzed by Hayley as part of her PhD research.

The sedimentary section found near Mera contained layers of crushed forest beneath volcanic ash. These “forest beds” provide a snapshot of vegetation in the landscape at the time of eruption. Part of plants growing on the landscape thousands of years ago are clearly preserved in the sediment.

Field work near Mera (Ecuador)

September 3, 2012
WDG

Mera (Ecuador)

We have now spent two days in sampling sedimentary sections near the Rio Tigre close to Mera in Ecuador. The sections are peat deposits interspersed with volcanic ash and contain many wood macrofossils. It seems likely that the depositional environment was a shallow water swamp or bog. Although we will have to wait for the analysis of the fossil record to know the composition of the vegetation at the site.

Sediment Hunting near Mera

Mera Rio Tigre section

: Sunset at Giobambua hotel

PCRG August

August 29, 2012
WDG

I am writing this August post from the Hotel Rincon Escandinavo (Quito, Ecuador) most of this month has been pretty hectic as we have been preparing for this field work trip and trying to get as many things out the way before hand.

We seem to have been quite involved in conference activity: Lottie presented “500,000 years of vegetation change from West tropical Africa” at the International Paleolimnology Association Symposium in Glasgow, Hayley had an abstract on “Pollen counting for diverse tropical ecosystems” accepted for the Linnean Society Palynology Group meeting (1 November) and group members also submitted abstracts for consideration to be presented at the American Geophysical Union Congress and British Ecological Society meeting (both in December); fingers crossed these will be accepted as well.

Regarding the field work. Preparation seems to have gone well and we have arrived in Quito with all out bags, despite a short (1 hour) connection in Madrid. Tomorrow we will meet up with Dr Patricia Mothes (Instituto Geofisico) and set out our detailed plans. As I have now been up for more than 24 hours I should probably get some sleep… Plan is to blog more about the trip as it happens.

PCRG July

August 3, 2012
WDG

PCRG members taking part in the Milton Keynes NSPCC Half Marathon, 8 July (left to right: Charlotte Miller, Wesley Fraser and William Gosling)

I have been really excited with the increase in the number of posts and various contributions to this blog over the last month or so. So thanks to everyone who has contributed. The excellent content allows me to focus on just a few research and teaching events which have not been previously covered.

1) Welcome to Wesley Fraser who has joined us officilally as a visiting postdoc for a few months. We hope to develop a paper and another grant submission looking at pollen/spore chemistry during this time; for further details see “Do plants wear sunblock” post.

2) Well done to Frazer and Hayley for performing well in their end of year 1 mini-vivas. Both projects are progressing well and we are all looking forward to field work at the end of the month. Hopefully most of the prepartation and equipment are now in place…

3) Potential for more exiting collaborations was also developed at two meetings. The first, at the Natural History Museum and, in conjunction with long term collaborator Steve Brooks was with old friends Mick Frogley (Sussex) and Alex Chepstow-Lusty. Both Mick and Alex taught me when I was at Cambridge and it would be super exiting to develop a new collaboration with them looking at Chironomids in Andean lakes. The second was at the Univesity of Nottingham as I took part in a UK Tropical Peatlands meeting which brought together ecologists and palaeoecologists from Nottingham, Leeds, Leicester and The OU. The aim of the meeting was to coordinate papers and grant applications.

4) At the end of July beginning of August I taught on the “Sedimentary Rocks and Fossils in the field” topic for the new Practical Science, Earth & Environment (SXG288) module which The OU now offers. Longridge Towers School (no children around this time of year) provided the perfect base for investigating the sedimentary geology of the region. The small group of students had the opportunity to make field observations and test hypotheses related to past environmental change. Everyone was very excited to find numerous fossils and interesting sedimentary structres and had fun trying to work out what they all meant! Congratulations to Angela Coe for putting together this great event.

Reconstructing environmental change in Jamaica

July 23, 2012
WDG

by Mick Burn and Suzanne Palmer (University of West Indies)

Our whistle-stop tour of the UK brought us to the PCRG on the 26-27 June. We are undertaking a multiproxy (ostracods, gastropods, forams) study of different coastal lagoons along the south coast of Jamaica in order to reconstruct coastal environmental change over the last Millennium. Jamaica lies not only within the firing line of Atlantic tropical cyclones but also forms part of the Gonave microplate, which has been responsible for a series of large earthquakes within the region, including the infamous 2010 earthquake in Port au Prince, Haiti. As a consequence, one of our main challenges is to distinguish between sediments deposited during abrupt climatic and tectonic events over the last ca. 1000 years.

Figure 1: A section of the sediment record from Albion Ponds.

The purpose of our UK visit this year was to split cores recovered from Albion Ponds in preparation for ITRAX XRF core scanning at Aberystwyth University in August. We are very grateful for the hospitality at PCRG and look forward to developing further collaboration on projects in the very near future.