Documenting Past Climate

Virtual Field Trips

Wrangell-St Elias National Park and Preserve website contains photos and information about the land area that is the source for the glacial materials found in the Surveyor Fan, a large submarine sediment feature in the Gulf of Alaska.

Julia Clarke is a Professor and John A. Wilson Fellow in vertebrate paleontology in the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who studies birds and other theropod dinosaurs to better understand major transitions in the history of life. She is particularly interested in how structures in living animals developed and how novel ways of moving—such as avian flight and wing-propelled diving—evolved. She travels around the world to find fossils that have the potential to answer these questions--China, South America, Mongolia, and even Antarctica! She emphasizes curiosity, perseverance, resilience, and interdisciplinary thinking, and integrative collaboration with scientists from other fields as essential to a successful career in paleontology. To find out more about her research, career and lab at UT Austin, click here. Julia Clarke is also one of the founders of the Geoscience Ambassadors Program, which is working to cultivate a larger and more diverse geoscientific community by challenging participating geoscience students to document their different pathways into the geosciences, present these authentic stories to young people, and catalyze and influence in their home communities; report what they learn about how geoscientific pathways are perceived by members of their home communities and how they could be better supported; and lead a support network for prospective, incoming and graduating students in the geosciences.

Dr. Kaustubh Thirumalai is a Texas EX and an Assistant Professor in the College of Geosciences at the University of Arizona. As a graduate student in the Jackson School of Geosciences, Dr. Thirumalai studied modern reef corals to understand past climate.

Lisa White is a paleontologist and the director of education and outreach at the UC Museum of Paleontology. She lived in San Francisco since age 5, and grew up near the California Academy of Sciences, where she always enjoyed museum exhibits on rocks, minerals and fossils. As a junior at San Francisco State University, she enrolled in a geology class and was drawn to the subject matter. She received encouragement from the instructor to pursue geology as a major. After that, on an internship at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, her love of and expertise in geology and paleontology grew stronger from the mentoring she received from professional geoscientists. In her third summer interning at the USGS, she began working on a project involving deep marine sediments and microfossils. She was hooked on fossils as a geological specialty, and in graduate school at UC Santa Cruz, she specialized in diatom microfossils and their applications to dating deep marine rock sequences around the Pacific Rim and interpreting ancient environments. She is also an alumna of San Francisco State, where her parents met in the 1950s, and she was a member of the geosciences department faculty from 1990 to 2012.

Jasmine Nelson is a Master's Student in Paleontology at the University of Texas at Austin working with Dr. Julia Clarke. She graduated from DeBakey High School for Health Professions in 2015, where she was interested in both veterinary medicine and orthopedics. She went to the University of Texas of the Permian Basin in Odessa, TX - oil capital of Texas - to pursue a BS degree in Geology. Though it was an eight hour drive from home, it was within 3 hours of almost all geologically interesting sites in Texas! There, she focused on the Wink County sinkholes in Wink, Texas and their further development. After getting her BS in Geology in 2019, she moved to Austin, Texas where she is pursuing her Master's degree. She is developing proxies to predict the hearing capabilities of extinct reptiles at UT Austin. She plans to pursue her PhD and go on to become a professor at a predominantly undergraduate university.

Grace Musser is a Geoscience Ambassador, Ph.D. Student at the University of Texas at Austin, and visual artist. Her pathway to geoscience was a meandering one and began with an interest in art. She first majored in Studio Art as an undergraduate and created large oil paintings inspired by natural history dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History, which she still creates and exhibits today. She then interned at the Museum as an exhibit preparator, aiding in creating large dioramas for traveling exhibits. Working with scientific curators and artists at the Museum led her to double major in Anthropology and go on to earn her Master's in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology. During this time she began to study extinct and living dinosaur anatomy and evolution, which led her to earning a doctorate in Geology at UT Austin where I she continues to research the evolutionary relationships of these animals. Honing her visual skills for so long has given her an advantage in studying anatomy, especially fossilized skeletons and soft tissue, as paleontology is a field where much of the data and data processesing requires keen visual discernment. Her unique background also allows her to come up with creative solutions to scientific problems. Because of this she encourages creative people, especially artists, to not rule out a career in geoscience. To learn more about her research and art, click here.

Humberto Venancio is a Geoscience Ambassador and Geology Major at the University of Texas at Austin. His faith compelled him to study Geology and dinosaur Paleontology, despite being from a disadvantaged socio-economic background where he was taught that jobs had to be paychecks above all else. At a very young age, he was exposed to dinosaurs and would become a toddler junior paleontologist. He remembers doing everything from playing with toys to leading digs and expeditions in the sandbox on the playground. He never outgrew this love and that passion has driven him every step of the way. He was also raised Catholic. From a young age, he was taken to Mass and Sunday School. It was in middle school that he first started to fall in love with his faith. At the same time, he was at a private school where his loyalty to science was challenged. In high school, his faith deepened futher, but it was also challenged more than ever. Despite this internal schism between science and faith, he found a way to resolve the issue after lots of thought, research, and prayer. It could have been easier to simply choose a side but instead he swam in the gray. He encourages anyone who struggles between two choices to have the courage to examine if the situation isn't as simple as it seems.

*This unit is uses the entire series of activities from the Climate Detectives module. This module uses a challenge-based learning approach (Challenge). Please make sure that you understand the challenge and that students read through this challenge before beginning the first Lab. The challenge is found is also found on the Student Navigation Menu.

The Lab Overviews page gives a brief description of each lab and links to the student pages. Each lab activity teacher page includes a brief summary, overview of the activity and needed materials, download and print files, teaching notes and tips, suggestions for student notebook use, assessment options, NGSS standards, and any additional resources.

Climate Detectives is one of four modules in the EarthLabs Collection that explicitly teaches about Earth's climate system. We recommend that teachers read the information contained in EarthLabs for Educators and Policy Makers'.

*There is also an EarthLabs App for iPad that teachers and students can downloaded to interact with the visualizations. For this unit, 6B & 6D: The Core Lab is on the interactive menu.

*For navigating through the EarthLabs modules look to the left-hand side of the web page. Please remember that the Teacher Navigation Menu has a green background and the Student Navigation Menu has a white background.