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| Weather monitoring at one of our sites |
by Jessica Conroy
Hello from the Galápagos, where I’m in the midst of the second
leg of my water-sampling journey, following my adventures in Kiritmati last
May.
Again I’ve hitched a ride on a
paleoclimate project, this time with my graduate advisor, Jonathan Overpeck,
long-time collaborator and mentor, Julie Cole, and UA graduate student and good
friend Diane Thompson (who you may remember from
Kiritimati). It’s a great
group, and we’re doing some really exciting science!
I have been working in the
Galápagos since I was a baby graduate student, back in 2004. My ultimate goal
is to try to understand long-term climate change and climate variability in
this region.
There are very few climate
observations, like precipitation and temperature, for the 20
th
century from the Galápagos. Thus, we don’t know much about long-term changes in
climate here. And it’s important to understand how 20
th century
climate was different (or similar?) to past climate, since what goes on in the
tropical Pacific can ripple across the atmosphere, influencing climate in many
parts of the world.
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| About to begin the climb down to Genovesa Crater Lake |
My graduate work focused on finding
the climate signal in Galápagos lake sediments. I’ve found that I can match my more
recent lake sediment measurements to the limited climate measurements in the
region over the last 50-100 years. This is a super cool approach, not always
done in the field of lake science, that can really enhance our understanding of
the climate histories we reconstruct from lake sediments—less arm-waving, you
could say. But, many questions and uncertainties remain, and there is much more
work to be done.
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| La Pirata, our home for the week. |
My postdoctoral work takes up the
challenge of better understanding climate signals in lake sediments and in
other paleoclimate proxies, like corals. I’m focused on understanding the links
between the stable isotope values in seawater and rain and local and
large-scale climate.
This means
I’ve been taking lots of water samples all around the Galápagos—off our awesome
boat, La Pirata, from the black
shorelines of volcanic rocks, and from some pretty sweet beaches. Life is
tough.
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| Trying to stay clean at El Junco, an unlikely prospect. |
Unlike Kiritimati, it’s barely
rained here, since it’s the peak of their dry season. However, we did notice as
we ventured to a special lake called El Junco into the cloud-covered highlands that it was wet wet wet, with lots
of mud to go along with all the misty rain. It was wetter in the highlands
than last time I was at El Junco, in 2004. Is this part of a trend? Or just the interannual variability at this elevation?
Hopefully I’ll have a good answer to that question soon!
