Ringing in the New Year

Or should that be New Semester?

We are gearing up for a new semester in the lab. This year Gil and I will be joined by not one, not two but three other graduate students!

Becky is an up and coming masters student that worked in the lab during her undergraduate degree. We want to congratulate Becky on all the hard work she did in undergrad and making it to the next level of awesome! Becky will be continuing to work on Mesodesma from Caylán in the Nepeña Valley, Peru.
Jacob will be continuing on in the lab analyzing an archeological site in Caylán in the Nepeña Valley, Peru.
Gilman is working on a new project studying Siderastrea from Haiti while taking over my old post as Master of the Lab.
I am staying busy milling samples from Montastraea colonies recovered from offshore Veracruz, Mexico.
Our last incoming graduate student to the lab will be announced with flourish at a later date :) It will at least make me update this more often.

Our many projects are coming along nicely in the lab. Including an ancient oyster study being conducted by Andrew Trahan, an undergraduate working in the lab. Drew presented his work at the LSU Undergraduate Research Conference in the fall. We have a Donax study that is being worked on by Jacob as well as Alex, another undergraduate working in the lab. We have more coral projects than we have time to list that are being worked on. Alison Bojarski, an undergraduate senior, will be presenting at her first conference when we travel to Honolulu, HI in February to present at the 2014 Ocean Sciences Joint Meeting. We want to congratulate her on having her abstract accepted to this conference!

We held SWIRLS sessions at AGU 2013 this past December. We had a wonderful turn out for all of our sessions and want to thank everyone that submitted an abstract and attended our sessions throughout the meeting. We enjoyed catching up with past colleagues and meeting new ones.

Happy researching until next update!

-Robin

Rocking the Lab Coats!

This past Thursday and Friday we visited our collaborators at the U.S. Geological Survey, St Petersburg Coastal & Marine Science Center in St. Petersburg, FL. I received ICP-OES (Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectromemtry) training while running samples for my dissertation project. We have heard many comments in the past that women cannot be scientists, even by little girls. ICP training was attended by only women! There are strong females in the sciences and we are going to rock our lab coats!

Why do we use an ICP-OES? We use the equipment to determine the ratio of strontium-to-calcium in the coral skeleton which can tell us past sea surface temperatures. My dissertation project will reconstruct 220 years of sea surface temperatures in Veracruz, Mexico using Montastraea faveolata (star coral) coral colonies.

In other new we have a new Phd student in the lab! We welcome Gilman Ouellette to our lovely lab group.

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Announcment

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship program is a wonderful funding opportunity for graduate students in a research based master's or doctoral programs that are within their first year of graduate school. The eligibility criteria, deadlines, and essay statement have been updated recently. For more information please check out this link.

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2013/nsf13584/nsf13584.htm?WT.mc_id=USNSF_25&WT.mc_ev=click#elig

T Minus One Week!

...Until abstracts are due that is. Are you an early bird submitter or a last minute submitter like most of us? If you have not already submitted your abstract to this years AGU Fall 2013 Meeting please check out our session PP005: Climate Variability from multiple reconstructions.

We hope to see all of you at AGU!

Calling all Abstracts!

It's that time of year again! AGU 2013 will be held December 9-13 in San Francisco, CA. Today is the opening day of abstract submissions for the AGU 2013 Fall Meeting. Deadlines for abstract submissions is August 6 at 11:59 EDT.

Do you have an awesome multiproxy climate reconstruction you are itching to present? Yes you say? Then come submit your abstract to our session! If you have any questions about the session please feel free to comment or contact us! We hope to see you in San Fran!

PP005. Climate variability from multiple reconstructions

SWIRLs:
  Characterizing Uncertainty

Conveners:
Kristine DeLong 
Louisiana State University 
kdelong@lsu.edu

Jason Polk 
Western Kentucky University 
jason.polk@wku.edu

Each paleoclimate proxy has its own unique strengths and interpretation limits. Combining records with a common climate forcing allows researchers to extract the common climatic signal while reducing reconstruction uncertainty. Multiproxy records can be the same archive with different variables measured (e.g., δ18O and Sr/Ca), unique archives with the same variable (e.g., coral δ18O and speleothem δ18O), or any combination therein. Combining records with differing resolution is challenging yet may reveal unique results not possible with a single archive. We encourage abstracts involving multiproxy records that explore climate variability or abstracts that assess methods and uncertainty in producing reconstructions based on multiple records.

Session information: http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2013/scientific-program/session-search/sessions/pp005-climate-variability-from-multiple-reconstructions/
Submit your abstracts today! http://agu-fm13.abstractcentral.com/abstract

Across the Pond

Kristine, Beck and Jacob are traveling to the International Sclerochronology Conference of 2013 in Caernarfon, Wales. Becky (an undergraduate) will be presenting her work at her very first conference and Jacob will be presenting at his first international conference. My poster was shipped off with them as someone had to hold down the lab with everyone traveling.

Becky Hood is presenting her work on archeological Mesodesma donacium shells from the site of Caylán in the Nepeña Valley, Peru.

Jacob Warner is presenting his work on archeological Donax spp. shells from site of Caylán in the Nepeña Valley, Peru.

My work on a Diploria strigosa coral colony recovered from the Flower Garden Banks off the Coast of Texas will be presented by Kristine DeLong.

In other news: Drew will be starting on his first project in the lab while everyone is away. Drew received an opportunity through the ASPIRE Program at LSU to work on an individual project over the summer. We are fortunate to have such a dedicated freshman working in out lab that we get to keep for four years!

Ancient Underwater Forest

An article came out today about a project we are working on with Grant Harley at the University of Southern Mississippi and Ben Raines an environmental reported for the Alabama Media Group . While we have not been out to the site, we have been working on samples here in the lab. From the outside the chunks of wood look pretty beat up but once you cut into them the smell of freshly cut cypress fills the lab. Radio carbon dating at the Lawrence Livermoore National Laboratory reveled that these samples are radio carbon dead, which means they are older than 50,000 year old and cannot be dated accurately! What do you think this says about sea level rise?

The article can be found here.

Check out some of the photos we have taken in the lab.