This month’s SFBC Members’ Meeting will take place online on Tuesday April 28 at 7:30 PM PST. The meeting will be held online through Zoom.
PRESENTATION:
This month’s presentation, beginning at 7:40 PM, will be:
*Greenland Caves Project. *
An interdisciplinary team comprising researchers from the Universities of Innsbruck, Akron, Oxford, and Sheffield has recently returned from a successful expedition to a remote area of Northeast Greenland located at 80°N. The expedition, which was funded through an FWF Start Prize to Prof. Gina Moseley (Inst. Geology, Innsbruck), collected samples and undertook research into the region’s palaeoclimate and environment, geological history, former glacier extent, geomicrobiology, and entomology. The palaeoclimate research will be used to improve understanding of how this region, which is highly sensitive to climate change, responds in a warmer and wetter world. The palaeoglaciology team collected 22 rock samples that, combined with contextual geomorphological mapping from the ArcticDEM, will provide information about the timing of ice sheet recession and thinning in this little-studied, yet important region. Additionally, samples were collected to help understand a more ancient glacial event at the Ordovician-Silurian boundary, 445 million years ago. Whilst in Greenland, the team documented and explored over 30 caves that had never previously been visited. In doing so, they broke their own records for the longest explored cave in Greenland and the most northerly explored cave on the planet. Several samples were collected from the caves for geomicrobiology to determine the mechanism that allows microbial survival in these cold and dry caves, and the role that these species may play in the formation of unusual cave formations.
*Dr. Hazel Barton Bio: *Dr. Barton’s research is geared toward understanding microbial interactions and adaptations to nutrient-limitation, as experienced by ecosystems in deep subsurface cave environments (see Dr. Barton’s cave science site <www.cavescience.com/>). Dr. Barton is an avid caver, having explored caves on five continents, is a past director of the National Speleological Society (NSS), the Quintana Roo Speleological Survey, and an award winning cave cartographer. Dr. Barton’s recently presented an NSS webinar <caves.org/webinars/index-8.shtml> on coronavirus.
DIRECTIONS: sjsu.zoom.us/j/920512539?pwd=V3BWWmVLdkFsSm5lZFBHbVZENUdkdz09
Password: 676883
Thanks!
Rafael