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TI 308 - QUATERNARY ENVIRONMENTS

Lecture times:		Mondays 10-11 & 2-3  location: IT 125 (ground floor)
Instructor:		Aaron Potito
E-mail:		aaron.potitonuigalway.ie
Office location:		AC 118
Office Hours:		Monday 11-12, Tuesday 2-3
Phone:		00 353 91 49 3936 internal ext. 3936
			Course Outline available here.

Course Description

Earth’s climate has rarely been stable, and is generally in a dynamic state of change. This variability occurs at many different spatial and temporal scales, but we generally lack long enough scientific or historical records to directly measure most long-term patterns of climate change. Quaternary Studies fills this void by offering evidence of climate conditions during the last ~2 million years (the most recent geologic period), providing a broader context for studying modern environmental phenomena.

This course offers an overview of the Quaternary in three phases. The first section of the course situates the Quaternary within a broad history of Earth’s climate, discussing Quaternary glaciations and conditions during and since the last Ice Age in detail. The second section of this course reviews the myriad of methodologies that are utilized to reconstruct past conditions, focusing on how these methods are used as windows into the past. Finally, as climate variability has impacted past and present human societies (and vice-versa), we will assess human/environment relationships during the Quaternary and explore modern anthropogenic climate change using a palaeoclimatological perspective. 

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Method of Assessment

Field Trip Essay (~1000 words)        20%
Group Lab Report (~1000 words)      20%
Final Exam (2-hour)                         60%

Field Trip – We will spend a day viewing evidence of Quaternary processes and Quaternary climate change in Connemara on Friday 1st March. Students will write a short essay (~1000 words) using field evidence, hand-out and supplementary readings provided on the field trip. Field Trip Essays are due by Thursday 14th March.

Group Lab Report – I will extract a sediment core from a marsh site near Corrib Village during lecture at 2:00 pm on 11h March. The core will be displayed in the School of Geography and Archaeology Teaching Lab (AC 117) on 12th March. All students will observe core extraction, and will work in groups to measure, describe and attempt to interpret the sediment core stratigraphy. Groups of four will be assigned alphabetically, and students will sign up for lab time slots during week 9. Lab reports will be written as short scientific papers (~1000 words plus figures/tables) and consist of Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion sections. Group Lab Reports are due by Thursday 28th March.

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Course Readings

Main Texts:
I have compiled a custom text of selected chapters from two existing textbooks:

Bell, M. and M.J.C. Walker. 2005. Late Quaternary Environmental Change: Physical and Human Perspectives, Second Edition Prentice Hall, Harlow, England: 348 pp.

Lowe, J.J. and M.J.C. Walker. 1997. Reconstructing Quaternary Environments, Second Edition. Prentice Hall, Harlow, England: 446 pp.

Custom text is available in the book shop, and the custom and original texts are in the library on 1-day desk reserve.

In addition, short articles on all class topics can be found in the Encyclopedia of Quaternary Science. An electronic version of this very helpful source can be accessed through the NUIG library catalogue.

Supplementary Readings:
R1. Kerr, R.A. 2000. An appealing snowball Earth that’s still hard to swallow. Science 287: 1734-1736.

R2. Rees, P.M., C.R. Noto, J.M. Parrish, and J.T. Parrish. 2004. Late Jurassic climates, vegetation, and dinosaur distributions. The Journal of Geology 112: 643-653.

R3. deMenocal, P.B. 2001. Cultural responses to climate change during the late Holocene. Science 292: 667-673.

R4.  Wintle, A.G. 2007. History of dating methods. In Encyclopedia of Quaternary Science, pp. 18-27.

R5. Krajick, K. 2002. Ice man: Lonnie Thompson scales the peaks for science. Science 298: 518-522.

R6.  Blackford, J. 2000. Paleoclimate records from peat bogs. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 15: 193-198.

R7. Baillie, M.G.L. and D.M. Brown. 2002. Oak dendrochronology: some recent archaeological developments from an Irish perspective. Antiquity 76: 497-505.

R8.  Bradley, R.S. 1991. Pre-instrumental climate: How has climate varied during the past 500 years? Developments in Atmospheric Science 19: 391-410. ( Access through author’s homepage)

R9. Barnosky, A.D., P.L. Koch, R.S. Feranec, S.L. Wing, and A.B. Shabel. 2004. Assessing the causes of late Pleistocene extinctions on the continents. Science 306: 70-75.

R10. Goebel, T., M.R. Waters, and D.H. O’Rourke. 2008. The Late Pleistocene dispersal of modern humans in the Americas. Science 319: 1497-1502.

R11. Bonsall, C., M.G. Macklin, D.E. Anderson, and R.W. Payton. 2002. Climate change and the adoption of agriculture in north-west Europe. European Journal of Archaeology 5: 9-23.

R12. Elias, S.A. 2007. Societal Relevance of Quaternary Science. In Encyclopedia of Quaternary Science, pp. 1-10.

R13. Willis, K.J. and G.M. MacDonald. 2011. Long-term ecological records and their relevance to climate change predictions for a warmer world. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 42: 267-287. 

Other useful texts in library:

Bradley, R.S. 1999. Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary.

Williams, M.A.J. 1998. Quaternary Environments.

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Class Schedule download here

    

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