4 comments PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND– Lake sediments are perfect for investigating past environments and climate change. But when your study lake is frozen over and the sediments lie more than 100 feet down, extracting them takes some ingenuity. Here’s how we do it and what it might look like on 5th Avenue.
Billy D'Andrea studies the natural variability of Earth’s climate system using single-cell algae as an indicator of past temperatures. He is a NOAA Postdoctoral Fellow working at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and develops and applies molecular and isotopic techniques to reconstruct past climate change from lake sediments. Billy loves the Arctic and worked in southwest Greenland for seven years prior to beginning research in northwest Norway this summer.
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Billy-
What an excellent, informative, and charming video you have here. Well done, sir. I hope you are having fun up North. Take ‘er easy.
Alex
love the NYC analogy, and the soda in the straw analogy too. makes it really easy to understand. so THAT’S what you guys are doing up there. i get it! but now of course it just makes me want to learn more about what the next steps are–how you take a hockey puck of mud and figure out what the climate was like thousands of years ago. i’ll stay tuned…
billy, i am a friend of your father and also a retired earth science teacher. i’m impressed that you are able to explain what you are doing in plain english. the fact that you can do so in understadable terminology with practical examples makes this a great resource. i will pass your website on to other earth science teachers.
really nice video; i need this for my limnology classes! cool stuff