Event

The Department of Earth & Environmental Science

University of Pennsylvania

Invites you to attend a EES Seminar Series

Friday, February 10th - 3:00 PM

'Quantitative constraints on Earth's past climate from inert gases in ice' 

Marine sediment reconstructions of ocean temperature provide valuable insight into past climate change on a range of timescales. However, resolving the global response of ocean temperature to past climate perturbations with these records remains challenging, as the alignment of multiple records with high spatial coverage across the ocean basins is required. The atmospheric ratios of xenon, krypton, and nitrogen (Kr/N2, Xe/N2, and Xe/Kr) are set by the relative partitioning of these gases between the ocean and atmosphere via their unique, temperature-dependent solubilities in seawater and therefore track total ocean heat content, or mean ocean temperature (MOT). Because the atmosphere is well mixed on annual timescales, these tropospheric gas ratios are globally uniform, and MOT may be reconstructed from a single ice core record. In this presentation, I will discuss applications of the MOT proxy in providing constraints on past components of the climate system, including ocean heat uptake, atmospheric CO2, ice volume, and Earth's energy imbalance. 

Dr. Sarah Shackleton

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Geology, Paleoclimate

Higgins Research Laboratory

I’m currently a postdoc at Princeton University working on extending atmospheric gas and ice records with blue ice archives. My research focuses on understanding past climate processes and states with ice cores. My research interests include the evolution of glacial cycles, ice-ocean interactions in past warm intervals, and small and largescale ice processes and their role in the interpretation of ice core records.