Some Like it Hot: Tropical Temperatures & Ecosystems Over the Last 100 million Years

The Geosciences Dept and Class of 60’s Scholars Program present a lecture by Dr. Pincelli Hull, Yale Univ., on “Some Like It Hot: Tropical Temperatures and ecosystems Over the Last 100 million Years.”  Dr. Pincelli  is broadly interested in the evolution and ecology of open ocean ecosystems and species over long-time scales, as these are the scales on which species evolve and go extinct and ecosystems collapse and reassemble. Planktonic foraminifera, tiny protists with a calcareous test, play a central role in her research because they are abundant and widespread in modern and ancient seas. This is important as most inhabitants of the open ocean have virtually no fossil record. With foraminifera it is possible examine ecological and evolutionary dynamics across the broad range of times scales, from days to many millennia.

Research in her group focuses on understanding open ocean ecosystems through the Cenozoic (the last 65 million years), disentangling the causes and consequences of mass extinctions, and quantifying community response to global change.