Late Quaternary environmental and climatic changes in the eastern North Pacific

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Understanding of mechanisms behind climate change, and its influence on Earth’s ecosystems is an important and challenging scientific task. My work is motivated by fundamental questions: how changing climate impacts coastal environments, how past abrupt climatic changes affected marine primary productivity, and how to reliably extract quantitative information on paleoenvironments from marine sediments. The long-term objective of my research program is to calibrate microfossils (primarily dinoflagellate cysts) as biological proxies of environmental conditions in coastal waters, and to advance high-resolution (paleo) environmental reconstructions in the late Quaternary. More specifically, my research is based on the identification of organic-walled microscopic organisms: primarily dinoflagellate cysts, as well as pollen, spores, and foraminiferal organic linings in sediments. These microfossils are well preserved in sediments, and their records contain information about environmental conditions at the time of deposition, which will be used to investigate sea-surface conditions, ocean circulation, climate, and marine primary productivity both now and in the geological past.