K.D. Nelson Lecture Series – Dr. Yige Zhang

The Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences presents the K.D. Nelson Lecture Series featuring speaker Yige Zhang. His talk is titled: Connecting Past Climates & Biological Cycles to Our Future. 

The study of paleoclimate is often motivated by the notion that “history repeats itself”. In reality, however, “deep time” paleoclimate reconstructions often suffer from low sedimentation rates and therefore low temporal resolution (>thousands of years), much longer than human life-span timescale and therefore less informative about our future climates. In this talk, I will present our recent thoughts and efforts to make past climate and biogeochemical cycle data more “useful”.  Three case studies will be discussed, including using large legacy data to constrain the global carbon cycle, building high-res yet deep time paleoclimate records, and a new method to directly compare past ocean temperature data with modern observations and climate model output.