XClose

UCL Earth Sciences

Home
Menu

Life and Environments

Palaeoclimate, Palaeobiology, and Environmental change: exploring the past and future Earth system through geochemistry, sedimentology, and palaeontology

Palaeoclimate, Palaeobiology, and Palaeoenvironments
This area of research encompasses palaeoclimate, palaeoenvironments, and palaeobiology. We aim to reconstruct past climatic, environmental, and biotic changes in the oceans and on the land, spanning a wide range of timescales from the Precambrian to the present day, with a view to understanding how the Earth system operates and how it might change in the future. We are particularly interested in aspects such as landscape dynamics, ice sheet-ocean-climate interactions, biogeochemical and carbon cycling, ecosystem changes, biogeography, and evolutionary responses to environmental change. 
 

To this end, we develop and apply a wide range of observational and analytical techniques to sedimentary and fossil archives, including isotope and trace-element geochemistry, geochronology, sedimentology, petrography, microfossil assemblages, 3D digital visualisation, and macroevolutionary and morphometric analysis. Such approaches are ground-truthed by laboratory experiments and modern calibrations, and the results are integrated with landscape, climate, and ecosystem modelling to explore the dynamics of past and future environmental change.