Alex's Blog

Today was my first day back from a 2 week vacation to Europe. Before I

left, I was compiling Speleothem records (Speleothems are stalagmites

and stalactites) of Oxygen and Uranium isotope ratios for my two grad

student supervisors Dan and Miguel. These ratios when compared to age,

can give important information on rainfall and climate from the past.

(The longest ones range all the way back to around 60,000 years ago).

The point of all of the compiling is to look for patterns in the data

that could help us predict future climate change by looking at the

past. Before I left on vacation I had organized data from Cave of the

Bells, Fort Stanton Cave, Moaning Cave, and had just started on

Klamath Cave. These are all caves from the United States, and I hope

to do the same for some similar caves in China. I have been using

excel and datagraph to try and make sense of the data so far, and I

will soon be putting this information on an application called ArcGis,

which lets the user combine data like graphs and tables on a

topographic map. This will be used for visual aids on my poster for

our debriefing, and eventually the Fall 2012 Agu meeting.