Event type:
Seminar, Virtual event
Organised by:
Pal(a)eo PERCS
Event status:
EVENT CLOSED
About Pal(a)eo PERCS
Pal(a)eo PERCS (Paleo EaRly Career Seminars) is a weekly seminar series that promotes and features work by early career researchers who are working in the broad field of “Pal(a)eo” sciences (e.g., -ntology, -ecology, -oceanography, -climate). PERCS is intended as a venue to share research, strengthen the global community, and facilitate collaboration between the Paleo sciences. All paleo- researchers and fans are enthusiastically welcome.
About this seminar
Fire is crucial to maintaining modern subtropical grasslands, yet our empirical support for the origins and evolution of this association is limited by a dearth of coeval records of both grass and fire proxies in pre-Quaternary sediments. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are a suite of molecules that can derive both from the burning of terrestrial vegetation and from thermal maturation of organic matter.
I developed an approach to quantitatively source these molecules to enable reconstructions of Neogene fire occurrence. Here, I test hypothesis that fire-feedbacks facilitated the rise of C4 vegetation in the Mio-Pliocene using Pyrogenic PAH abundance patterns alongside records of δ13C of leaf waxes on two continents.
Fire-derived PAH relative abundances jumped an order of magnitude in association with a rise in grass inputs recorded at the landscape (Pakistan) and continental scale (Bengal Fan) in South Asia, but not in Australia. These results support fire disturbance as a critical mechanism of terrestrial biome transitions, but emphasise the need to reconstruct fire explicitly alongside other climate and ecological variables, as fire-feedbacks can differ drastically between continents.
The seminar will begin at 3.00pm UTC.
Speaker
Dr Allison Karp (Yale)
Registration
An access link will be emailed to all those subscribed to the mailing list prior to the seminar.
Venue
All seminars will be hosted via Zoom.
Accessibility
All Pal(a)eo PERCS seminars are closed captioned. If you require any other particular accessibility accommodations to be put in place, please do get in touch with the committee, who will be happy to accommodate those as best they can.
Contact
Please contact the Pal(a)eo PERCS steering committee via [email protected] with any enquiries.