The June 2024 General Meeting will be held on September 13th, 2024 at 8:00 PM via Zoom. The presenter is Patty Standring of the University of Texas. The topic of her talk is "Tiny Time Capsules: How we use some of the smallest fossils to study global paleoceanographic change".
Foraminifera are single-celled organisms that live in the ocean and create microscopic shells that become fossilized in marine sediments. Because these organisms biomineralize the calcite of their shells, they represent both an ecological and geochemical record of the ocean environment at the time they were alive. They also have one of the most complete fossil records spanning to as far back as the mid-Jurassic, providing an unparalleled archive of paleoclimate and paleoceanographic data, especially for the Cretaceous through the present day. This presentation will briefly discuss how we use these mighty but tiny organisms to explain changes in Earth's history, and what this knowledge can tell us about future climate change.