Paleoclimatology expert to speak on climate change in EAPS lecture

Jessica Tierney

A University of Arizona geosciences professor who studies past climate change for insights into current patterns will speak Thursday (April 18) in a lecture series by the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.

“Revisiting the Pliocene Ocean as an Analog for Near-term Climate Change” is the title of the D.W. Levandowski Lecture in Earth Science, named for a former Purdue professor. The speaker, Jessica Tierney, associate professor of geosciences at Arizona, will draw on her research in “molecular paleoclimatology” for her talk. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 3:30 p.m. in the Electrical Engineering Building, Room 117. Refreshments will be shared afterward in Hampton Hall, Room 2201.

Tierney investigates environmental information preserved in sediments. She uses stable isotopic analysis, climate models and statistics to assemble a picture of climate history. By using knowledge from modern-day samples, she can reconstruct climates from the geologic past.

The Pliocene Epoch, 3 to 5 million years ago, interests many scientists because it was the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide exceeded its current level of 410 parts per million. Tierney’s work suggests modification of theories of a “permanent El Niño” during the Pliocene, leading instead to a scenario of “a remarkable symmetry” between Pliocene climate change and what may come in the near future.

Donald W. Levandowski became a Purdue professor in 1967 and served more than 20 years, including 10 as department head of what was Geosciences and then Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. He directed the Indiana Mining and Mineral Resources Research Institute from 1980 until 1993. His work and publications in remote sensing gained wide respect globally, and he advised many governments and the International Atomic Energy Agency. He served as an advisor to NASA on observation satellites and was a member of the Indiana Lieutenant Governor’s Science Advisory Task Force. He died in 1994.