The Department of Fisheries Oceanography will be hosting Raquel Bryant on Wednesday, April 2 from 3-4.  Bryant, Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University will be discussing “Ocean storytelling with fossil foraminifera” Please join us for this seminar in SMAST East 101-103 or online via Zoom!

 

Abstract:

Foraminifera are unicellular, marine organisms that boast one of the most complete and extensive fossil records of any organism – living or extinct. Their pervasiveness in marine sediments and rocks from throughout the Phanerozoic make them excellent storytellers about Earth’s past oceans. Among foraminifera, or forams for short, there are varieties that live at the top of the water column amid primary producers and at the seafloor within or above the sediment. Through the life of a foram, they grow their tests (shells) by adding chambers and take on distinct shapes, sometimes depending on the ambient environmental conditions. Thus, their assemblage structure and morphology through geologic time can be used to reconstruct paleoenvironments and interpret paleoceanographic change. In this talk, I present examples of the storytelling power of forams from the Late Cretaceous (~100 – 66 million years ago) Western Interior Seaway and from a new project studying the glaciation of Greenland through the Neogene (~23 – 2.5 million years ago) based on sediments recovered during International Ocean Discovery Program Expedition 400.