marine micropaleoecology

The ocean has been the dominant arena of life for most of Earth's history, yet understanding how marine ecosystems have changed across geological time requires archives that extend far beyond the instrumental record. Microfossils provide exactly that. Tiny, abundant, and extraordinarily well-preserved in marine sediments, they offer a near-continuous record of ocean conditions stretching back hundreds of millions of years — the ocean's own field notes.

Planktic foraminifera are among the most powerful of these archives. These single-celled organisms are exquisitely sensitive to ocean temperature, chemistry, and productivity, and their shells accumulate in sediments across every ocean basin on Earth. Crucially, foraminifera can be grouped into functional types, reflecting differences in depth habitat, feeding strategy, and environmental tolerance, allowing us to move beyond simple diversity counts and ask how the functional structure of communities changes across climate transitions. By studying morphology, isotopic composition, and functional community composition over time, we can reconstruct not only environmental conditions but also the ecological reorganization of entire ocean communities across warming events, cooling pulses, and shifts in ocean circulation. Beyond foraminifera, the lab uses shark dermal denticles and echinoderm ossicles as microfossil proxies for marine community change, asking how predator communities and benthic ecosystems have responded to environmental perturbation across deep time.

A recurring theme is the relationship between climate change and ecological reorganization. Understanding how marine ecosystems have responded to past climate change is an essential context for predicting how they will respond to the changes underway today.