Next TERC talk: Nature Tells Its Story - The Climate Archive of Caves

Join the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center at an in-person lecture on Thursday, June 2, 2022, with UC Davis professor Isabel Montañez. Nature Tells Its Story: The Climate Archive of Caves will be held at the Tahoe Science Center in Incline Village at 6:00 p.m.

California boasts hundreds of caves, many of them hidden in the Sierra Nevada foothills. These caves hold much more than beautiful icicle-like stalactites and stalagmites. Trapped inside the stalagmites are tiny droplets of fossilized precipitation from climates long ago. UC Davis researcher Isabel Montañez shares how these water droplets provide a "climate archive" that may help us predict future shifts in rain, snow, drought, and fire.

Research in the Montañez lab describes a period of rapid global climate change in an ice-capped world much like the present - but 304 million years ago. Within the last 300,000 years, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels doubled, oceans became anoxic, and biodiversity dropped on land and at sea. Recently, the Montañez lab has been able to focus on a transition 304 million years ago, titled the Kasimovian-Gzhelian boundary, or KGB. Researchers estimate that about 9,000 gigatons of carbon were released into the atmosphere just before the KGB. Learn more about this fascinating research by reading this research article, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 2nd.

Admission is $10 in advance and $15 at the door. Refreshments and a no-host bar will be available from 5:30 - 6 p.m. The lecture will begin at 6 p.m. in the UC Davis Tahoe Science Center at 291 Country Club Drive in Incline Village (between Tahoe Boulevard/SR 28 and Lakeshore Blvd.) on the campus of Sierra Nevada University. Visit HERE for tickets.