On Wednesday, Oct. 8, Professor Meredith A. Kelly from the Department of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth College delivered a talk in Olin 306 on tropical high-altitude climate conditions during and after the last glacial maximum. The talk was hosted by the Union College Geosciences Department.
Her research focuses on advancing the terrestrial record of past climate change in tropical regions and using it to improve understanding of modern climate patterns.
Kelly graduated from Tufts University in 1990 and shared that she “got into being a geologist because of getting the opportunity to go out in the field and understand ice sheets, glaciers, and climate” during her undergraduate years.
In her talk, she elaborated on her research in countries such as Uganda, New Guinea, Colombia and Costa Rica, focusing on the humid inner tropics between 10ºN and 10ºS. In these latitudes, glaciers were strongly driven by climate and temperature rather than topography.
Along with her team, Kelly has traveled to these sites and used methods including field mapping, radiocarbon dating, cosmogenic radionuclide dating, lake sediment records and snowline reconstruction using computer models to estimate the extent of glaciers during the last glacial maximum. By doing so, they have modeled changes in the equilibrium line altitudes of glaciers, revealing key information about how the climate has changed since these glaciers retreated and disappeared.
Kelly also discussed the impact of Milankovitch cycles on long-term climate change and briefly elaborated on the “Zealandia Switch” hypothesis, which suggests that these cycles are influenced by oceanic and atmospheric circulation in the Southern Hemisphere, rather than primarily by Northern Hemisphere factors as is widely believed.
Overall, the talk was insightful and largely directed toward experienced geologists, though Kelly made sure to explain complex topics in simple terms for everyone to understand. Interested students can learn more about these subjects by taking courses such as Geomorphology, Paleoclimatology, and Glacial and Quaternary Geology, taught by Professor Donald T. Rodbell of the Geosciences Department at Union.
