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.