GEOL 5700-4

Seminar in Paleoclimate

Spring 2017

K-T boundary, Raton Basin coring in Florida Straits

Course description: This course will be a Kafka-like toboggan ride through the paleoclimate literature. Paper choices will be guided by the confluence of 'landmark' contributions, paleoclimate 'heroes,' and several topics of interest to students*. No time period or topic will be off-limits.

Possible inspiration for landmark papers (the books are all on reserve in the Bartlett Info Center at SEEC):
Paleoclimates (2010) by Tom Cronin
Paleoclimate (2013) by Mike Bender
Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery (1979) by John and Katherine Imbrie
The Glacial World According to Wally (2002) by Wally Broecker
Hay (1988) Paleoceanography: A review for the GSA Centennial
Berger (2013) On the beginnings of palaeoceanography
The Warming Papers (2011) by David Archer and Ray Pierrehumbert

Some mega-landmarks that will not be assigned, but that every student of paleoclimatology should read:
Arrhenius (1896) On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature of the ground
Hays, Imbrie, and Shackleton (1976) Variations in the Earth's orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages

*Here are some topics that were brainstormed on Day 1:
ocean acidification and anoxia
pre-Pleistocene paleo pCO2
rapid warming events (e.g. PETM, ELMO)
tectonics and climate
glacier/ice sheet dynamics
ocean and atmosphere circulation
Great Oxidation Event
Snowball Earth

The students' list of 'heroes' is given in the Day 1 PowerPoint, below.

Expectations and grading: During the semester each student will be required to make one formal AGU-style presentation on an assigned reading, and to lead the discussion of that reading. Each student will also be responsible for leading informal discussions of up to two additional papers during the semester. Each week everyone is responsible for reading the papers and participating in the discussions. Grades will be based on overall participation (50%) and on the effort put into the presentations and discussion-leading (50%).

Meets: Thursdays 3-4:40, SEEC S298
Instructor: Tom Marchitto, tom.marchitto@colorado.edu
Office Hours: By appointment, SEEC S153C or Benson 435
Credits: 2
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Course schedule (updated weekly)
Note that many of the links below must be accessed from a campus computer or via VPN
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Week 1: Organizational meeting
Tom's Day 1 PowerPoint
Below is some potentially useful background material on paleoclimatology and climate forcings:
Summary of some relevant climate forcings (PowerPoint)
IPCC AR5 Paleoclimate chapter (Chapter 5)

Week 2: Recognition of the CO2 problem
Keeling (1970) Is carbon dioxide from fossil fuel changing man's environment? (David)
Neftel et al. (1985) Evidence from polar ice cores for the increase in atmospheric CO2 in the past two centuries (Garrett)
In the same vein, the paper that is credited with coining the term 'global warming': Broecker (1975) Climatic change: Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?

Week 3: The Phanerozoic Greenhouse/Icehouse paradigm
Fischer (1980) Climatic oscillations in the biosphere (Simon)
Lowenstein et al. (2001) Oscillations in Phanerozoic seawater chemistry: Evidence from fluid inclusions (Brigitta)
The critical underlying 'Vail curve': Vail et al. (1977) Seismic stratigraphy and global changes of sea level, Part 4: Global cycles of relative changes of sea level

Week 4: Phanerozoic pCO2: Controls and terrestrial evidence
Berner et al. (1983) The carbonate-silicate geochemical cycle and its effects on atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 100 million years (Rhiana)
Franks et al. (2014) New constraints on atmospheric CO2 concentration for the Phanerozoic (Sarah)
Berner's update to include sulfur and O2: Berner (2006) GEOCARBSULF: A combined model for Phanerozoic atmospheric O2 and CO2
Recent GEOCARBSULF simulation with comparison to proxies: Van Der Meer (2014) Plate tectonic controls on atmospheric CO2 levels since the Triassic

Week 5: An ocean view of pCO2
Popp et al. (1989) The post-Paleozoic chronology and mechanism of 13C depletion in primary marine organic matter (Garrett)
Zhang, Pagani, et al. (2013) A 40-million-year history of atmospheric CO2 (Simon)

Week 6: Chicken or egg? Chicken and egg? Chicken and waffles?
Molnar and England (1990) Late Cenozoic uplift of mountain ranges and global climate change: Chicken or egg? (Anne)
Raymo and Ruddiman (1992) Tectonic forcing of late Cenozoic climate (Lina)

Week 7: Climate models. Huh. Yeah. What are they good for?
Barron et al. (1981) An ice-free Cretaceous? Results from climate model simulations (Garrett)
Katzav (2014) The epistemology of climate models and some of its implications for climate science and the philosophy of science (Joe)
Energy balance model used by Barron et al., with a brief discussion of the landmark models that came before: Thompson and Schneider (1979) A seasonal zonal energy balance climate model with an interactive lower layer
Landmark modeling study on latent heat transport under elevated CO2, with a very brief comment on the Mesozoic (p. 117): Manabe and Wetherald (1980) On the distribution of climate change resulting from an increase in CO2 content of the atmosphere
A more recent attempt to simulate an equable climate using an AGCM (CCSM3): Huber and Caballero (2011) The early Eocene equable climate problem revisited

Week 8: When the sea suffered from indigestion: OAEs
Takashima et al. (2006) Greenhouse world and the Mesozoic ocean (Anne)
Barclay et al. (2010) Carbon sequestration activated by a volcanic CO2 pulse during Ocean Anoxic Event 2 (Sarah)
The paper that coined the term 'OAE': Schlanger and Jenkyns (1976) Cretaceous oceanic anoxic events: Causes and consequences
Perspectives piece on the modern relevance of OAEs: Watson (2016) Oceans on the edge of anoxia
Everything you never wanted to know about the marine phosphorous cycle: Baturin (2003) Phosphorus cycle in the ocean

Week 9: PETM warming and ocean acidification
Kennett and Stott (1991) Abrupt deep-sea warming, palaeoceanographic changes and benthic extinctions at the end of the Palaeocene (Abby)
Zachos et al. (2005) Rapid acidification of the ocean during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (Brigitta)
Overview of geologic acidification events, with a marine carbon primer: Honisch et al. (2012) The geological record of ocean acidification
Boron isotopic constraint on the surface pH drop: Penman et al. (2014) Rapid and sustained surface ocean acidification during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
Extracting rates without an age model: Zeebe, Ridgwell, and Zachos (2016) Anthropogenic carbon release rate unprecedented during the past 66 million years
All about microtektites: Schaller et al. (2016) Impact ejecta at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary
The jacuzzi paper: Frieling et al. (2017) Extreme warmth and heat-stressed plankton in the tropics during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

Week 10: Tectonic gateways and Pleistocene glaciation
Bacon et al. (2016) Quaternary glaciation and the Great American Biotic Interchange (Lina)
Cane and Molnar (2001) Closing of the Indonesian seaway as a precursor to east African aridification around 3–4 million years ago (Joe)
MOC reorganization at ~4.6 Ma linked to Panama closure: Haug and Tiedemann (1998) Effect of the formation of the Isthmus of Panama on Atlantic Ocean thermohaline circulation
El Nino-like Pliocene would have inhibited glaciation: Huybers and Molnar (2007) Tropical cooling and the onset of North American glaciation
What might have caused an El Nino-like Pliocene? Fedorov et al. (2006) The Pliocene Paradox (Mechanisms for a Permanent El Niño)
The latest word on Panama vs. Indonesia: Karas et al. (2017) Pliocene oceanic seaways and global climate

Week 11: Marine d18O, the Rosetta Stone of the ice age cycles
Emiliani (1955) Pleistocene paleotemperatures (Rhiana)
Lisiecki and Raymo (2005) A Pliocene-Pleistocene stack of 57 globally distributed benthic d18O records (David)
Phase relationships between climate and orbital forcing in the late Pleistocene: Imbrie et al. (1992) On the structure and origin of major glaciation cycles 1. Linear responses to Milankovitch forcing

Week 12: Milankovitch mysteries
Raymo et al. (2006) Plio-Pleistocene ice volume, Antarctic climate, and the global d18O record (Sarah)
Clark and Pollard (1998) Origin of the Middle Pleistocene Transition by ice sheet erosion of regolith (Simon)
Competing idea for the 40k world: Huybers (2006) Early Pleistocene glacial cycles and the integrated summer insolation forcing
Influential work on the 100k world: Imbrie et al. (1993) On the structure and origin of major glaciation cycles 2. The 100,000-year cycle
Or is it this simple? Tzedakis et al. (2017) A simple rule to determine which insolation cycles lead to interglacials

Week 13: LGM to Holocene ocean-atmosphere dynamics
Wang et al. (2017) Deep-sea coral evidence for lower Southern Ocean surface nitrate concentrations during the last ice age (Anne)
Chen et al. (2016) A high-resolution speleothem record of western equatorial Pacific rainfall: Implications for Holocene ENSO evolution (Abby)

Week 14: Enter: Humans
Gill et al. (2009) Pleistocene megafaunal collapse, novel plant communities, and enhanced fire regimes in North America (Brigitta)
Ruddiman et al. (2016) Late Holocene climate: Natural or anthropogenic? (David)

Week 15: Exit: Toboggan
Waters et al. (2016) The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene (Lina)
Oreskes et al. (2010) Adaptation to global warming: Do climate models tell us what we need to know? (Joe)
Philiosophical take on our historical attitude toward nature: White (1967) The historical roots of our ecologic crisis