Oster Terrestrial paleoclimate lab

We aim to increase understanding of Earth’s past climate by unlocking climate information from geologic and environmental archives. Our goal is to document past variations in terrestrial hydroclimate and understand the climatic teleconnections that modulate this variability. Our approach is interdisciplinary, coupling diverse and quantitative geochemical tools with sophisticated global circulation models. We develop and interpret records of climate change from stalagmites, that are particularly sensitive to changes in rainfall amount, source, and seasonality. We also aim to understand how modern cave systems respond to seasonal and interannual environmental changes with an eye toward using this understanding to provide an interpretative framework for calibrating paleoclimate records from cave deposits. Presently, our lab has active research projects in California, Tennessee, Wyoming, India, and the ABC Islands.

We are working in a cave in Tennessee to understand how trace elements and carbon isotope signatures in water are transformed as they move from the soil through the epikarst and into the cave so that we might better understand these potential paleoclimate proxies. You can read about that work here and here.

In 2019 we welcomed a Thermo DeltaV Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometer to our lab to analyze light stable isotope ratios of environmental samples.

We use geochemical and isotopic information from speleothems and soils to understand how water availability has changed in the western United States. We integrate this data with climate models to understand the drivers of past hydrologic change.