Tuesday 15th February, E0.05 from 1.00-2.00 pm.
Lunch, and an opportunity to chat with the speaker, will be in room E402, John Dalton East Building from 12:30. All are invited!
Prof Dave Nash, Brighton University
Quaternary Environmental Change in the Atacama
The Atacama Desert of northern Chile is the driest and possibly oldest of the major southern hemisphere subtropical deserts. Extreme hyperaridity may have begun as early as the Miocene (25-22 million years ago). Despite this, there is evidence for wetter conditions on a number of occasions during the Late Quaternary. Marine records indicate that the Last Interglacial and Last Glacial Maximum were relatively wet compared to a dry Holocene. Terrestrial evidence for past environmental conditions is limited, with the majority of high resolution records coming from ecological investigations in the Andean precordillera and dating back no further than 50,000 years before present. This seminar, based on work funded by National Geographic, aims to redress this imbalance and presents a palaeoclimatic data set spanning the last 180,000 years as recorded in near-coastal aeolianites (wind-blown sands that have been partially cemented by calcium carbonate under subaerial conditions) from southwest of Copiapó. The seminar reports on the sedimentology and environmental history of the aeolianite deposits and examines the implications of their development for our understanding of Atacama and wider South American palaeoenvironments during the Late Quaternary.
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