Paleontology and Paleoclimate
The paleoclimate group is currently looking for a graduate student to participate
in geoarcheological investigations of Weedon Island Florida!
USF graduate students pursue research in Quaternary environments and paleoclimatology,
and mass extinctions and climate variations in deep time. The Quaternary Research
at USF focuses on the geological record of rapid and dramatic climatic and environmental
changes occurring on time scales ranging from decades to hundreds of thousands of
years. Paleontological research at USF is focused on several fields but primarily
emphasize the use of macroinvertebrate fossils to understand not only evolutionary
change, but also past depositional, oceanographic and atmospheric systems and how
they have responded to different scales and mechanisms of environmental change focused
on comparing the differences, in the broadest sense, between greenhouse and icehouse
climates. Graduate students on this track will do field work (our students have
been doing recent work in the western US, Europe, and Middle East), and use a variety
of lab techniques to elucidate climate change on a variety of scales.
Current Graduate Students include:
- Rick Bowersox (PhD candidate): Late Neogene Paleobathymetry, relative sea level,
and basin subsidence in the San Joaquin Basin, California.
For more information about graduate studies in paleontology and paleoclimates, please
contact
Peter Harries,
Greg Herbert, ,Jonathan Wynn, or
Rick Oches.