It’s difficult to understand how one or two degrees of global temperature rise can even be observed, much less have any impact on climate and ecosystems. It’s especially difficult to accept as we struggle through another cold and snowy winter. The effects of global warming are hardly noticeable on the timescale of a person’s life. However, on a geologic time scale, abrupt climate change and its catastrophic effects are readily discerned. We’ll discuss how we use 19th, 20th, and 21st century techniques to tease information about climate and environment from rocks and how we can correlate this with events in the fossil record. We’ll put special focus on an event called the Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum (MECO), a period of global warming that occurred around 40 million years ago and is recorded in rocks of western Utah.
Penny Higgins is a consulting geochemist and paleontologist with her business, EPOCH Isotopes. Her specialty is using chemical studies of rocks and fossils to infer patterns of temperature, precipitation, vegetation, and dietary preferences. She applies her technical and instrumental knowledge as the Laboratory Operations Supervisor at Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, NY. Though she loves science, she loves her cats more and founded Mew-Mew House, a 501(c)3 retirement and hospice home for cats, which she runs out of her house.