Bering Sea Deglaciation
As the Ice Age ended, the North Pacific underwent a series of sudden periods of rapid warming, large phytoplankton blooms, and low-oxygen (hypoxic) intermediate water.
My current project involves characterizing the ecosystem's response to these abrupt changes in the local environment; and looking for clues as to what could have caused these large-scale reorganizations in ocean nutrient regime.
BioGeoChemistry
The intersection between:
biology (like phytoplankton!)
geology (fossils!) and
chemistry (the elements that make up our world)
Biogeochemistry can include a lot of things;
The natural world has no frontiers between what we are taught as being distinct branches of science. Each of these disciplines has its own philosophy and focus, so they can each help shed a different light on the systems I study. As I try to understand what type of signal is captured by the isotopes of plankton fossil shells, I incorporate biological, geological, and chemical considerations in my interpretation.
Molecular Biology
What does Molecular Biology have to do with BioGeoChemistry?
The fossils I study are unicellular organisms; they only have a single cell with which they must breathe, find nutrients, stay floating in the light, grow, reproduce, deter grazers, and create enough energy to live. Whew! Those single cells can do a lot!
If we want to use their fossils to understand their environment, it helps to understand the processes, all happening at a molecular level, which underpin the biochemical signals we measure.
For example, if you're using coccoliths (shown) to estimate CO2 concentration in the ocean, you should consider whether different species have different carbon concentrating mechanisms that could cause differences in C fractionation unrelated to the CO2 in their environment.
