Phanerozoic oceans in 3D – what palaeontologists can learn from climate models. Talk by Dr Richard Stockey, Southampton University.
Much of our study of ancient extinctions is motivated by an appreciation of the threat ongoing global climate change poses to Earth’s ecosystems. Earth has warmed and cooled many times before, sometimes with catastrophic impacts on biodiversity and other times not. Understanding what makes a mass extinction is critical to applying lessons from Earth’s history to the challenges we face today.
Richard is particularly interested in how we can do a better job of understanding the interactions between ancient environmental change and ancient biodiversity dynamics. To do this, he combines information from the paleontological record with state-of-the-art reconstructions of ancient climates and oceans, using similar approaches to those used by modern climate modellers.
In this talk, Richard will discuss the exciting possibilities that these new approaches offer for palaeontologists as well as some new questions that we are able to test by integrating methods from across disciplines, including drivers of the Cambrian explosion, the Devonian rise of fishes and the end-Permian mass extinction.
Richard is a Lecturer in Palaeobiology in the School of Ocean and Earth Science at the University of Southampton. Something that really motivates him as a palaeontologist and geoscientist is the potential for our study of ancient environmental change to inform our approach to current and future climate change.
Much of his work is computational, using modelling approaches to better understand how (particularly marine) environments have changed through Earth history, what that might have meant for marine animals, and how the biosphere responded.
Richard is also increasingly interested in Earth’s long-term future, and particularly in how geological perspectives can inform our approach to conservation and planetary stewardship. He has worked at Southampton for two years and is heavily involved in undergraduate teaching, running the first year palaeontology module. Before his current position, he was at Stanford University in California.