Back to the Future of Climate Change

Researchers at Syracuse University are looking to the geologic past to make future projections about climate change.

Christopher K. Junium, assistant professor of Earth sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), is the lead author of a study that uses the nitrogen isotopic composition of sediments to understand changes in marine conditions during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM)—a brief period of rapid global warming approximately 56 million years ago.

Junium’s team—which includes Benjamin T. Uveges G’17, a Ph.D. candidate in A&S, and Alexander J. Dickson, a lecturer in geochemistry at Royal Holloway at the University of London—has published an article on the subject in Nature Communications (Springer Nature, 2018).

Their research focuses on the ancient Tethys Ocean (site of the present-day Mediterranean Sea) and provides a benchmark for present and future climate and ocean models.

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