Late Quaternary environmental and climatic changes in the eastern North Pacific

了解气候变化背后的机制及其对地球生态系统的影响是一项重要而具有挑战性的科学任务。我的工作动机是基本问题：气候变化如何影响沿海环境，过去的气候突变如何影响海洋初级生产力，以及如何可靠地从海洋沉积物中提取有关古环境的定量信息。我的研究计划的长期目标是校准微体化石（主要是甲藻孢囊）在沿海沃茨的环境条件的生物代理，并推进高分辨率（古）环境重建在第四纪晚期。更具体地说，我的研究是基于有机壁微生物的鉴定：主要是甲藻孢囊，以及花粉，孢子和沉积物中的有孔虫有机衬里。这些微化石在沉积物中保存完好，它们的记录包含有关沉积时环境条件的信息，这些信息将用于研究现在和过去地质时期的海面条件、海洋环流、气候和海洋初级生产力。

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.