How did former civilizations, such as the ancient Greeks and Romans, restructure their environment and how do their impacts compare with those of modern industrial society? Today in the Mediterranean, 98% of marine resources (from algae to whales) are depleted …
Algae-eating fish are critical to health of Coral Reefs Coral reefs are jewels of the ocean–magnificent structures built over eons by corals that, in turn, support a wealth of other animals. Unfortunately, corals are dying on many reefs across the …
IODP Expedition 361 drilled six sites off Southern Africa in Feb-March 2016. Our objectives were to: 1) recover a complete record of African climate and ecological history–from dust, pollen, soot, and marine fossils–in off shore drill sites from the Mozambique …
With Ph.D student, Elizabeth Sibert, I have been using the fossil record of fish teeth in the open ocean to reconstruct fish populations through recent geologic history. A recent result of this work is the finding (in Sibert and Norris. …
Although lots of things don’t preserve well as fossils, it turns out that we can reconstruct most parts of ecosystems pretty well. The terrestrial plant record is well preserved as pollen grains. The base of food chains has a good …
This is a neat idea–slather large amounts of resin on the outcrop at Stven’s Klint, in Denmark and then pull of the resulting ‘peel’ to make a sample of the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary section. In this slab (taken by folks at …
One of the predictions for the future is that parts of the ocean are expected to develop extensive low oxygen (hypoxic) zones. One worry is that larger low oxygen areas may affect fish, lowering catches and depriving people of rich …
An enduring mystery in Geology is why and how rocks move of their own accord over a nearly flat, mud-cracked lake bed in Death Valley National Park–the Racetrack Playa. We set up the “Slithering Stones Research Initiative” in 2011 to …
Among my interests is the evolution of zoogeography in the oceans, particularly in plankton but also in corals. I have been working for several years on the puzzle of how foraminifera repeatedly re-invade the Atlantic from the Indo-Pacific during interglacials …
What lessons we can learn from the geological record of marine ecosystems about the impact of future global change? We compare models of the future oceans with marine ecosystem structure during past high pCO2 climates of the “greenhouse Earth” and …