(photo taken in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve June 2010, left to right – Stephanie Jarvis (Wooster ’11), Dan Lawson of CCREL (US Army) and Debbie Prinkey (Wooster ’01))

2010 was tied for the second warmest year since we have been keeping track of global temperatures over the last 150 years. This course is an exploration of climate basics, paleoclimatology and contemporary climate change. The lab and lecture are integrated and we are about to explore past climate changes, how the present climate works, and critically assess the ongoing warming.

Global warming and climate change will be the environmental issue to receive the most attention over this century. Understanding how and why climate changes is important for interpreting the past geologic record and evaluating contemporary climate change. After an overview of Earth’s ocean-atmosphere system and energy balance, we will explore Quaternary (last 2 million years) dating methods and techniques of reconstructing past climates through field and lab projects. Students will work with paleoclimate data sets from ocean cores, ice cores, tree-rings, lake cores and corals. Labs will include computer modeling, analysis of time series and field and lab projects extracting lake sediment cores and collecting and processing dendrochronological data.

Preparation questions: At each class I will handout should be answered for the following class. They are designed to guide the discussion for the next class AND I will occasionally collect them and they will count as one of your quizzes.

Text books: We will be having readings from a variety of texts and two required books Earth: The Operators Manual and Storms of my Grandchildren. Additional readings will be handed out in class. Some readings throughout the class will be from THE GLACIAL WORLD ACCORDING TO WALLY and THE ROLE OF THE OCEAN IN CLIMATE YESTERDAY, TODAY , AND TOMORROW (available online and at the password protected readings tab)- written by Wally Broecker, a renowned climate scientist from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Goals: Climate Change is a Q (quantitative) course thus students will need to generate, manipulate and interpret quantitative data, use geologic concepts to solve problems and understand and apply scientific methodology. This course is also field and lab intensive and so students will demonstrate their ability to apply Field/Laboratory skills, Map Interpretation/Geographical Information skills, and Information Technology skills. As we will be performing original studies of lake and tree-ring proxies in the Wooster region students will be need to demonstrate independence of thought and expression. The work in this class will demonstrate integrative thinking by problem solving through multiple approaches. Finally through writing reports and giving class presentations the students will develop their communication skills.

Specific Learning Goals are to deepen your understanding in and to think critically about:

– the fundamentals of the Earth’s climate and how biogeochemical cycles and ocean-atmosphere systems operate and interact.

– how the observational and proxy records of climate change are generated and analyzed.

– the role and significance of natural and anthropogenic (human-caused) forcings on climate and strategies that can mitigate the impact of climate change.

Below are posts from Climate Change 21010 – Last Year Class.

Tree Exhibit – Draft Concepts and Ideas

Review Documents: Final Topics and the final review powerpoint (as a pdf).

On a beautiful Monday afternoon the class ventured south to the lake district of Holmes County to view some of the sites where we are working. First stop was Browns Lake.

We viewed the exotic vegetation of Northeast Ohio – below – a grove of Pitcher Plants.

Then we were off to Fern Valley – the soon to be College of Wooster Field Station –
here we removed data loggers from wells in the Wilkin Run stream.

On Monday, September 27^th, Wooster’s Climate Change class hit the road for Kidron, Ohio’s Sonnenberg Village.

The settlement is a rejuvenation project aimed to relocate and reconstruct over a dozen 19^th century buildings on this five-acre sight.  In addition to preserving these historical structures, the project incorporates environmental responsibility into its model by including sustainable living elements in its long-term plans.

Already, a garden is growing and three buildings have been successfully transferred to the sight.  But a fundamental piece of their heritage remains unknown—when exactly were they built?

This is where the climate experts come in.  Teaming up with College of Wooster faculty and students, representatives from Sonnenberg Village have invited Greg Wiles and his Climate Change students on site to discover the origins of these precious pieces of Ohio’s history.

When the team arrived they got right to work extracting samples.  Using the method of Dendrochronology, otherwise known as Tree-Ring Dating, the team used their expertise and precision to muscle their way into the history of mid-western American architecture.

Without damaging the integrity of these structures, the geo-team successfully extracted samples from a reconstruction in-progress, the Lehman Spring House, and the larger Lehman House.  Now, let the investigation begin!

After carefully prepping the core samples, dendrochronolgical evaluation began today.  The team is diligently counting and measuring tree growth rings, determined to discover the date early Ohioans constructed these historical shelters.  Lab work will continue until the Geo-team reports back on the solved mystery of Sonnenberg Village.

Odell Lake, located in Holmes County, Ohio, was cored this summer by The College of Wooster and the University of Cincinnati geology departments.

Geophysical techniques were used to map the depth and stratigraphy of the lake.

Odell Lake is a kettle lake, composed of three basins that were formed by ice breaking off of a retreating glacier.

Climate Change: Core Sample Lab, 9-12-10

Core samples and mud everywhere! At first glance, looking at feet and feet of mud samples from Odell Lake didn’t seem like the most fun activity. Little did we know we could truly act like real geologists, taking magnetic readings, putting together professional-looking photos and looking for organic life in the middle of these long, muddy samples. We each had different tasks that, together, would form a well-established report of the cores. My task was photographer. This put my years of photography training and photography schooling to work, just kidding. The task was a bit tedious but relatively straight forward. Taking detailed pictures of each core in stages to make sure no part was missed. Making sure everything was labeled correctly so there would be no confusion.  The next step was taking the separate pictures of the samples, three to a core, and splicing them together to make a visual of the core sample in its entirety. Having never used photo shop before, the TA, Stephanie Jarvis, and I worked through the confusion of technology and eventually got everything working.

Everyone continued to work examining and putting together the samples.

Other groups had the task of taking magnetic readings of the samples. The process looked confusing, but with the data collected, much could be told of the magnetic susceptibility of each sample.

https://climatechange.voices.wooster.edu/2010/09/20/165/

Last week Derek and I lined up all of the sections of lake core “E” in order to identify any transitions that we wanted to investigate.  After opening up each of the 5 thrusts and laying them end-to-end, we decided to look at a transition in E4 (the fourth thrust down from the sediment-water interface).

We chose this section because lots of the core was a reddish-brown color, but then all of a sudden it changed to a dark black color, indicating that there were many organic materials present at this time.  This is especially interesting because usually the organic materials are near the top of the core, but in core “E” we found the most organic-rich materials to be at the very bottom.

Derek and I cut out some pieces of sediment out from the transition and began picking organics out of these pieces under a microscope.  We will send these to Beta Analytic (a radiocarbon dating facility) to determine approximately when this transition took place, and our class will do some investigating into any possible climate events that occurred at this time.