Paleoclimatologist to Deliver American Rock Salt Lecture

Jessica Conroy, PhD (Photo provided)

Paleoclimatologist and professor Jessica Conroy, PhD, will deliver the 22^nd Annual American Rock Salt Lecture at SUNY Geneseo on Thursday, April 2. 

Conroy will present “Decoding the Tropical Pacific’s Climate History with Stable Isotopes” in Newton Hall, Room 214, from 7:30 to 9 p.m. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Conroy is a faculty member in the Department of Earth Science & Environmental Change at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. Her research examines marine and terrestrial geochemical records to reconstruct past climate variability. Her long-term goal is to better understand how ocean and atmosphere interactions and hydroclimate have changed over time and how they may respond to future climate change.

In this lecture, Conroy will explore how stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen in water (water isotopes) are powerful tools for understanding how Earth’s climate system works, both today and in the past, and explain how variations in water isotopes record information about rainfall, evaporation, and ocean–atmosphere interactions in the tropical Pacific. She will highlight two areas of research: measurements of modern precipitation and seawater isotopes in the Galápagos and Palau, and what they reveal about present-day hydroclimate processes. She will also present a new paleoclimate reconstruction from coral atoll lagoon sediments on Kiritimati in the Republic of Kiribati. 

Geneseo’s Department of Geological, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences and the American Rock Salt Company LLC have partnered on the American Rock Salt Lecture since 1994. 

View the event in the Geneseo calendar.