Day one, check!

Feet sore and tired after walking around at AGU all day today. Our fellow Tiger and climo student, Hal Needham, presented his poster on his wonderful SurgeDAT storm surge database. He had some good traffic around his poster whenever I ventured away from my sessions to talk to him.

San Francisco Bound

Posters are printed and slides are made for AGU 2012! We are excited to be catching up with old friends and making new ones. We hope to post short stories from time to time. If we don't update you here check out our shiny new Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/PASTLab

Our e-poster can be found at this link:
http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2012/files/2012/12/AGU-2012-RMCsmall.pdf

Now announcing AGU from the comfort of your desk!

Be a part of the 2012 AGU Fall Meeting - from anywhere! Take advantage of the expanded and improved virtual meeting options from the 2012 AGU Fall Meeting by accessing our  free, live streaming and video on-demand sessions and lectures. Learn more.   To receive notifications on the virtual meeting program schedule, including reminders about start times for live streaming events, text AGUVirtual to 69302. These events are free and open to non-Fall Meeting attendees – please share this information with anyone you feel may be interested.   Live Streaming Schedule*   Event: AGU Presidential Forum Speaker: Ira Flatow, NPR Science Correspondent Date & Time: Monday, 3 December: 12:30 - 1:30 P.M. PST   Event: DEEPSEA CHALLENGE: New Science and Technology at Extreme Depths Speakers: Panel Discussion, including James Cameron, National Geographic Explorer-In-Residence; Douglas Bartlett, Microbiologist, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Patricia Fryer, Geologist, University of Hawaii; and Kevin Hand, Astrobiologist, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Date & Time: Tuesday, 4 December: 12:30 – 1:30 P.M. PST   Event: AGU Union Frontiers for Geophysics Lecture Speaker: Professor Sir Bob Watson, CMG, FRS Date & Time: Wednesday, 5 December: 12:30 - 1:30 P.M. PST   Event: AGU Union Agency Lecture Speaker: Dr. Subra Suresh, Director fo the National Science Foundation Date & Time: Thursday, 6 December: 12:30 - 1:30 P.M. PST   Event: Communicationg Geohazard Risk Assessments: Lessons Learned From the Verdicts inthe L'Aquila Earthquake Case Speakers: Panel Discussion Date & Time: Thursday, 6 December: 4:00 - 6:00 P.M. PST   * These sessions will also be available through the Video On-Demand program within 48-hours after the live presentations.  All scheduled times are listed for Pacific Standard Time.   American Geophysical Union  2000 Florida Avenue NW   Washington, DC 20009

Happy Days!

We have had some recent developments in the PAST Lab.

Becky Hood, one of our undergraduate students in the lab, recently presented at The Louisiana State University Undergraduate Research Conference 2012 (URC). On top of it all Becky took home first place for oral presentations in the social sciences! Her oral presentation titled "Age and Season of Growth for Mesodesma donacium from the Nepeña Valley, Coastal Peru" presented work that she completed over the summer in the PAST Lab. Her abstract can be found here. Here is a brief bio on our departments website:

Becky worked with David Chicoine and Kristine DeLong on a sclerochronology project with the clam shell Mesodesma donacium from the Nepeña Valley in coastal Peru. Becky traveled to Peru and worked with Dr. Chicoine to recover and catalog shell remains from three archaeological sites. She worked with Dr. DeLong in the PAST lab to measure the shell cohort for comparison analysis. Then, she made a cross-section of one of the largest clams and counted the tidal bands in the surf clam. Becky determined the clam lived 99 days, which is considerably shorter than other locations farther south of Nepeña Valley. Becky completed her research in the summer ASPIRE program of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.


Here is a photo we snapped this summer of Beck busy with shell processing.

Our great and fearless leader is also now officially published in Nature Climate Change! Yes this is a repost, we are just so excited about it we have to tell you about it more than once. Her research has made it to the front page of lsu.edu! The write up can be found at this link. It looks good to see our research out there. Her article can be found here. We have received a great deal of support from the scientific community since the paper was published in late October. We have even had some comments on the beautiful graphs used in the paper. Trust me I aspire to one day have graphs that look that pretty.





Feel free to leave us comments on the new publication!

Come One, Come All!

We are proud to be hosting our next installment of the LSU Geography & Anthropology Department's Friday Forum Speaker Series next Friday September 21, 2012 at 3.30pm in Howe-Russell-Kniffen E130.

Grant Harley from the Geography & Geology Department at The University of Southern Mississippi will be presenting his work on Tree Growth Dynamics, Fire History, and Fire-Climate Relationships in an Endangered Subtropical Ecosystem.

If you are interested in talking with Dr. Harley in more detail please contact Dr. DeLong at kdelong@lsu.edu for more information.

Schools out for summer...Wait where did summer go!

We have been busy getting ready for fall semester since the last post. We have tons of pictures to load from our Flower Gardens trip but no time in which to do it. I will hopefully be able to slowly edit a post together when I have free time (What? That's unheard of!)

So far it's data analysis and writing for now, so no new happenings in the lab.We have a lot of student coming into the lab this semester, so we hope to have new projects up and running soon (and hopefully more posts). There is a Sclero class this semester so we should have some new stories from the class as well. We did get in some modern shells for the Peru project. Currently they are sitting in the lab stinking. Fire ant beds here we come! 

I figured out that the fire ant bed cleaning technique works really well when living at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. I found a freshly dead shell and knew it would stink up my dorm room. At the same time I really wanted to keep the shell. I happened to think of dropping my shell in a fire ant bed while I walked back to my dorm room from the R/V A. E. Verrill. The next morning when I went to breakfast I happend to check the ant bed and my shell was perfectly clean! Besides no one would steal my awesome shell and risk fire ant bites. Simply knock the ants of in grass, using a fork, a stick, gloves, or what ever you have on hand, and procede to have an awesome shell and a great morning! Don't forget to stir up the ants with a stick or grass to insure that they find your treasure when you drop it off for cleaning. 

Until cleaning it is suggested that one does not open the bag of shells unless one wants to have a really bad day and possibly make the entire lab a hazmat area. With fire ants there is no worry of any alterations to the geochemical signal since the shell is not subject to chemical alteration or baking. I find it's a win-win situation: ants get food, and you get an awesome shell! I have noticed since moving to Baton Rouge that there are less fire ants than in Alabama. This is both great and weird at the same time. It may actually take finding a fire ant bed to carry out this cleaning project. Either that or a forest of air fresheners in the lab.

We hope to post again... at some point... in the near future. We have a backlog of topics to post on and plenty of pictures. If only I could get class credit for this.

Land ho!

Just stepped on land, back from the boat portion of the Down Under Out Yonder Workshop. Seas were not as still as we had wishes for but a great time was had by all. 1-2 forecasts for waves turned into 5-7 on the open seas. Large Monster, Diplo-Blaster, and Sid coral colonies made us drool in our regulators. We will post more pictures later on a real computer.

On the road again...

On our way out to t
he Texas Flower Gardens as part of the Down Under Out Yonder Workshop. Kristine and I were able to be a part of the workshop presenting on our research to high school teachers and others interested in the sciences. We are going off shore for several days and getting tons of dives in! Doing some Reef surveys and looking for some possible future research :). Might as well make the most of it while we are out there! We will update as soon as we are back on shore and can get an Internet connection an hopefully get some pictures posted. Doing the whale shark dance!

Bon Voyage

Yesterday we said bon voyage to our fearless leader. Off to exotic places for some dives trips, some talks, then more dives. Whoever said scientists spend all day in the lab must not be in our field!

In the mean time I am still working away in the lab. I am currently finishing up the weighing portion of a DiploBlaster project from the Flower Gardens. DiploBlaster has become my new name for Diploria now, it sounds funny and makes me giggle :) At some point I will have a name for everything if I continue to stay so late in the lab. Coffee, Coke, and Skittles can only keep you awake for so long while drilling before insanity sets in.

They lab is now wonderfully decorated with Donax, Mesodesma (Messies) and oyster shells in various stages of processing. Julie cut the umbos of her oyster samples the other day and has put them in epoxy for thin sectioning. They look awesome all lined up on our tables!

Becky is off to Peru now. Becky is currently an archeology student but we are slowly turning her over to the paleoclimate side. "Come to the climate side we have cookies!" Her work with Messies produced some really nice images for band counting. Becky has told us she may take a trip to the Peruvian coast during her dig trip to see if she can find some modern Donax for reconstruction. I think we have done well in converting her.

I have yet to figure out how to set up a sun lamp in the lab so I can at least get some sun this summer. Not to mention I would get a heat lamp out of it. They like to freeze us in the labs on the first floor. I bet I am the only person in Louisiana wearing a Mountain Hardware fleece jacket during the day, or at all this summer.

Here Ye, Here Ye!

To our fine colleagues,
If you have tallied up records with decadal to sub-annual resolution or are exploring methods for reconstructing climate at such high resolutions, we invite you to consider our session for this Fall's AGU in San Francisco!

PP005: Climate Variability From High-Resolution Proxies

K. Halimeda Kilbourne
Univ. of Maryland Center for Environmental Science

Robin M Cobb
Louisiana State University

Kristine L DeLong
Louisiana State University

Paleoclimate records with decadal–subannual resolution provide a unique perspective on past climate on centennial–seasonal timescales. High-resolution paleoclimate data often overlap and extend the instrumental record, providing the increased observation period needed to investigate aspects of climate variability such as El Niño-Southern Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and Atlantic Multidecadal Variability. However, high-resolution records may include environmental noise that combines with analytical error to confound interpretations of relatively small signals. We encourage abstracts involving high-resolution records, either exploring paleoclimate, or exploring methods for improving these records.

Session details are at http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2012/session-search/single/climate-variability-from-high-resolution-proxies/
Submit your abstract today! http://agu-fm12.abstractcentral.com/

-Hali, Kristine, and Robin

Drilling Away Again in Margaritaville

I have been spending most of my days hidden away from the horrible Louisiana heat in our drill room working on a new project. I am working on a replication study within a core on a Montastraea colony. I have lovingly named it "The Monster" due to strange ability to sequester my milled powder or to randomly pinch out thecal walls. Working with our drill, Dante, I have gotten five years milled along two paths. Strangely enough Dante has been rather pleasant this project. He earned his name several projects ago when he would randomly lose his location or reset his origins. He drilled out his own level in the bowels of the underworld.

For this project Kristine and I created a new holder for the coral core. We were not able to slab the coral as is typical in our lab, so we just stuck the whole darn thing up there! Be it, the prototype was the best looking one but it broke. Its harder to work a jigsaw than you think, and to keep your lines somewhat straight or following the semicircle. I also figured out how to rig up our digital microscope to the drill so that I could see the walls in detail to adjust the path. I though it was quite clever. I just need to create something a little more permanent.

Autocat has become somewhat of a mascot. I created it when I was learning how to plot using the SuperCamp software. That was when Dante was acting up and instead of plotting lines I just gave up and created that little guy. I still have yet to name the gremlins in the computer.

Up and Running!

We have started this blog to give you some information into the daily happenings in the PAST Laboratory and throughout our travels. We currently have several students working on various interdisciplinary projects. It is never a dull day in the PAST Lab!
From time-to-time we will post short descriptions of our projects and other fun tidbits from the lab.
We hope that you enjoy our blog!