Alumni & Friends
LAS Alumni Information
Alumni Network
Geography
Antarctic Fossil Dig
Geologist Dan Blake headed south this past December—but not to escape snow and cold. Traveling to a small island off the Antarctic Peninsula, Blake took advantage of the region's summer sun to collect fossils in an area that is usually among the coldest on Earth. Seymour Island is called an oasis because during the summer it has extensive dry valleys with bare rock and little snow. The fossils sought after by Blake, his graduate student Alex Glass, and colleague Richard Aronson, a marine biologist from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, were snails and clams. At the end of the Eocene epoch some 55 million years ago, a cooling trend upset the balance of predator-prey relationships among shallow water marine communities.
The snails the researchers were collecting feasted on clams by drilling holes in the clams' shells and extracting the tender meat inside. The cooling temperatures reduced the abundance of clams, which, in turn, altered predation patterns. The researchers hope to determine how these patterns were affected by temperature by studying changes over time in the quantity of shells drilled.
The fossil record can reveal much about marine ecology then and now, says Blake. "Understanding the response of fossil faunas to global cooling in the late Eocene will provide insight into the rapidly changing structure of modern communities." This year's trip, funded by the National Science Foundation, was a reconnaissance mission in preparation for a five-week trip next year.
Winter 2001