Quaternary Paleoecology
Wheat fields outside of Provo, Utah, in the bed of Glacial Lake Bonneville, which existed when Maine was buried by glacial ice. Horizontal lines on distant hillsides are former shorelines. The Great Salt Lake of Utah is but a small remnant of Glacial Lake Bonneville.
Geology 372 --- Autumn, 2011

Instructor: Robert E. Nelson	Basic Text: Methods in Quaternary Ecology * edited by B. G. Warner (W)
Office: Mudd 215 (ext. 5804)	Lecture: MWF 11:00-11:50 a.m. in Mudd 103
E-mail: renelson@colby.edu	LABS are Thursdays in Mudd 103 & Arey 407
Office hours: 10:00-noon TTh and by appointment	My mailbox is in the Department of Geology Office, Mudd 209
Web Page for Quaternary References: http://www.colby.edu/geology/Quatresources.html

* Supplemental readings will be drawn from:
Quaternary Paleoecology by Hilary Birks and John Birks (B&B)
Reconstructing Quaternary Environments by J. J. Lowe and M. J. C. Walker (2nd ed.) (L&W)
Quaternary Paleoclimatology (2nd ed.) by R. S. Bradley (B)
+ papers from the scientific literature (which will be supplied here as pdf files)
( The above three books will, however, be on reserve in the Science Library in Olin
if I am unable to get copies of the relevant readings to you. )

Students: click HERE to download a pollen count sheet in Microsoft Excel, for use in counting the pollen from the Turner Farm core. (Note that there is a "1" for an unnamed taxon in this spread sheet; this is solely to avoid an error message in the percent column, generated by dividing by zero. It should be deleted from your counts.)

A thick (~70 cm) pumicious ash buried the underlying landscape in SW Alaska about 8000 years ago. This shows also at the base of the photo to the right.	More recently, around 3500 bp, a major eruption from Aniakchak Volcano buried the landscape beneath a pyroclastic flow that was also 60-80 cm thick here.
Response of the vegetation at this site was completely different to each of the two major volcanic events shown above ...... WHY? We'll explore reasons for this and many other "quirks" of the Quaternary over the course of the term.

Course Syllabus (as a pdf file)
Plant Taxonomy Table (as a pdf file)
First lecture - 7 September, 2011 (Introductions)
Birks and Birks, Chap. 1 (as a pdf file)
Birks and Birks, Chap. 2 (as a pdf file)
Intro. to Pollen Identification - 19 September, 2011
Lowe and Walker, Chap. 1 (as a pdf file)
Partridge, 1997* (as a pdf file)
Shackleton, 1997** (as a pdf file)
Morrison & Kukla, 1998*** (as a pdf file)
Lowe and Walker, Chap. 5
Pollen Types to Learn for Lab (as a pdf file)
Basic Pollen Morphology (as a pdf file)
Birks and Birks, Chap. 5 (as a pdf file)
Birks and Birks, Chap. 8 (as a pdf file)
Birks and Birks, Chap. 9 (as a pdf file)
R. D. Guthrie (2003): North American Pleistocene horse size reduction prior to extinction (as a pdf file)
Birks and Birks, p. 127-140 on beetles (as a pdf file)


ADDITIONAL READINGS

* Partridge, T. C., 1997. Reassessment of the Position of the Plio-Pleistocene Boundary: Is there a case for lowering it to the Gauss-Matuyama Palaeomagnetic reversal? Quaternary International, v. 40, p. 5-10.

** Shackleton, N. J., 1997. The deep-sea sediment record and the Pliocene-Pleistocene Boundary. Quaternary International, v. 40, p. 33-35.

*** Morrison, R., and G. Kukla, 1998. The Pliocene-Pleistocene (Tertiary-Quaternary) Boundary should be placed at about 2.6 Ma, not at 1.8 Ma! GSA Today, v. 8, no. 8, p. 9.




"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic." -- Anais Nin







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