BOONE—Johnny Waters will travel to Siberia and the Gobi Desert in northwestern China this summer as co-leader of a United Nations International Geoscience Programme project to study the geologic history of climate change.

Waters is a professor of geology and chair of Appalachian State University’s Department of Geology. He is the only person from the United States selected to co-lead the five-year project that will involve more than 60 scientists from 19 countries. Other research sites are in Africa, Mongolia, Southeast Asia and the United States.

Waters and other scientists will study the existing fossil record and fossils recovered from selected field sites to determine if there is a correlation between climate change, which they define as temperature change, and changes in the marine ecosystems in the Devonian and Carboniferous periods, which occurred 420 million to 320 million years ago. Their findings will provide data useful in today’s climate change discussion.

“Scientists are very concerned about modern temperature change and its impact on ecosystems,” Waters said. “At some level, it’s only by looking at the geologic past that you can see what impact major temperature changes had on ecosystems. One of the things paleontology can do is look at times in earth’s history when there were large changes in earth climate and see what actually happened.”

An undergraduate student from Appalachian will assist Waters in his field work and research.

“The interval we are studying is an interval when there was a huge climate change, from a greenhouse earth to an icehouse earth,” Waters said. “Greenhouse earth is a climate condition where there are no polar icecaps, the sea level is very high and temperatures generally are warm,” he said. “Icehouse earth conditions are when you do have polar icecaps, oceans are generally lower and temperatures are lower.”

The earth has been in an icehouse condition for the past 23 million years, Waters said.

Waters said the Devonian and Carboniferous periods were a time of major mass extinctions in which the tropical-marine ecosystems were seriously impacted and coral reefs disappeared for 100 million years.

“This interval is important because of the major mass extinctions that occurred. It also is a time when black shale deposits occurred around the world – the source of lot of oil and natural gas,” Waters said. “This period is important in understanding climate history, history of life and the basic conditions that one of our natural resources comes from.”

Advances in technology make it possible for scientists to measure what the temperatures were like 400 million years ago by studying changes in carbon and oxygen isotopes found in fossils.

“We are taking a comprehensive look at an interval where our estimates of carbon dioxide levels went from about 4,000 parts per million (ppm) to an estimated 400 ppm, which is the current level in the atmosphere.”

The drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide occurred as the first large forests developed on land. Trees absorbed the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then transferred it to the ground when the vegetation died and was buried. Over time, the decaying material became coal.

“It was an environmental crisis or major climate change over a very long time interval caused by plants invading land,” Waters said. “Studying this period provides support for assertions we are making about the impacts of climate on the ecosystem.”

Waters will evaluate the impact of the climate change on the fossil ecosystem and determine any correlations between climate change and loss of diversity.

“We live in a world where some people believe in climate change and some people don’t,” Waters said. “We live in a world where there are dire predictions about what climate change will mean, such as loss of diversity on the planet. But then there is the open question, ‘How do we know that is going to happen?’ One of the ways you can get a sense of this is to understand the geologic history of changes in climate and changes in ecosystem diversity.”

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