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Johannes Koch Department of Geology The College of Wooster | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| GEOLOGY 210 CLIMATE CHANGE
General:This course focuses on climate change during the Holocene and introduces students to different climate archives and their use to establish past climatic changes. Until recently, climate during the Holocene was considered to be geologically relatively stable. However, new research shows that climate was spatially and temporally variable. It is important to understand how climate has changed throughout the Holocene and how these changes influenced humans (e.g., the demise of the Mayan culture, settling and abandonment of Greenland). This understanding is especially relevant to the current climate change debate as the current rate of change appears to be anomalous and exceeds past rates. Course Topics :The most commonly used climate archives, including glacier fluctuations, tree-rings, lake and marine sediments, pollen, and ice cores will be introduced. Geographically, the course will focus on current knowledge of Holocene climate change in British Columbia and surrounding areas, but will also examine larger spatial and temporal patterns using examples from Europe (Scandinavia, Alps), the Southern Hemisphere (Patagonia, New Zealand, Antarctica), and the tropics (South America). Possible forcing mechanisms (orbital, solar, volcanic, ocean-atmosphere interactions, human) responsible for the reconstructed changes will be presented and discussed. The final part of the course will focus on future climate change scenarios and their environmental consequences. Text: Bradley, R.S.., 1999. Paleoclimatology. Reconstructing climates of the Quaternary. Academic Press, San Diego, 613 pp. ISBN: 0-12-124010-X.
Exams The exams will be primarily objective in nature with questions coming from the reading material and lectures. No make-up exams will be given unless an acceptable medical certificate is presented. Mid-Term I ( Oct. 05th, 9 – 10 am ) will cover material from weeks 1 through 6, Mid-Term II ( Nov. 07th, 9 – 10 am ) materials from weeks 7 through 11. The Final Exam (Dec. 11th, 9 m ) will be comprehensive. Student responsibilities: • Students are expected to attend every class and to have read the assigned readings before class. Acceptable medical certificates: Medical documentation must be submitted on letterhead from your doctor with signature and date and addressed to the instructor. Students requiring accommodations as a result of a disability are requested to contact Pam Rose, Director of the Learning Center (ext. 2595) AND notify the instructor within the first 2 weeks of classes. All discussions will remain confidential. Schedule - Fall 2007
A.R. Assigned Readings
Lab reports The lab component comprises field work, a visit to Byrd Polar Research Center and work on data collected during field work. We will collect tree-ring cores and lake cores during field work and you will have to analysis them during lab. In the end you will have to write short reports (5 pages). Term project – Poster and presentation For your research on your term project you can choose your topic. It obviously needs to be climate change related, but other than that it's your project so you need to show initiative. Once you have decided on a topic, or if you have trouble finding one, come and see me during office hours or after class. The way you present your topic is up to you, so a critical review of what's known is as good as a descriptive summary of a few key papers, is as good as a hypothesis that you prove or disprove with evidence from published articles. Use the Library resources such as GeoRef and GeoScienceWorld to get started, but the poster must be your own work. Be aware of the contents of C.O.W.s policy on academic honesty and the consequences for its violation. The poster should cover your topic in detail and show that you understand the topic not just from reading a few articles, but understand the background of the topic. For example, if you talk about Holocene marine sedimentation in the North Atlantic, I not only want to have a summary of the findings, but some information on the methods used, a short introduction into the topic, some figures (and copied figures from published papers are completely acceptable, but you need to reference them), etc. Prepare posters in Powerpoint and provide the original file as well as a pdf file on a CD. Do not include a reference list on the poster, but provide a separate word document with the list. You can find information on using Powerpoint for posters here: http://www.apsnet.org/meetings/2003/Powerpoint_Posters.htm http://depts.washington.edu/mphpract/ppposter.html Figures and tables are necessary as the poster should be visually appealing, but there also needs to be enough text to give me the impression that you understand the background. I will show some posters in class to give you an idea, but a walk around the Department or a search online will provide more options. The content of the poster will make up 85%, the presentation the remaining 15%, so the visual presentation, clarity, but also syntax and expression are important. The poster is due at 4pm on November 19, 2007. You will lose 10% each day your poster is late. You will give a short presentation (ca. 15 min) on your poster that day during lab. We will discuss the posters during class on November 30, 2007. Tutorial – Topics for short presentations In tutorials students will give 10 min presentations on a specific paper followed by a 5 min discussion. A list of papers follows below. They are listed according to the topics of each tutorial. If you would like to discuss a different paper in a tutorial, choose the correct tutorial, and inform me in advance. For preparation of your presentation, papers should be accessible and can be downloaded as pdf files through the Library website ( http://library.wooster.edu/ ) or are in the Library as hardcopy. If you have difficulties of finding your paper, let me know well in advance and I will provide a copy. |
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