Thursday 16 June, 4 PM CET
DR. SIETSKE BATENBURG
ABSTRACT: Ocean circulation plays a major role in the distribution of heat over the planet, and in the availability of nutrients and oxygen for marine ecosystems. I aim to disentangle the roles of geography and climate on circulation in past greenhouse worlds, and apply the tool of neodymium isotopes to track deep water masses in the Cretaceous and Paleogene.
Besides providing robust geochemical archives, marine sediments often faithfully record rhythmic variations in climate on time scales of thousands to millions of years, which were paced by variations in the Earth’s orbit. In this talk, I will highlight examples of Milankovitch cyclicity that underlie the construction of detailed geologic time scales and that provide insight in past greenhouse climate dynamics.