Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Paleoecology Of Glacial And Non Glacial Carboniferous Faunas During The Late Paleozoic Ice Age In Patagonia, Nicole Braun

Theses and Dissertations

The Late Paleozoic Ice Age (LPIA) records the only icehouse to greenhouse transition in Earth’s history that involved complex marine and terrestrial life and serves as an analogue for Quaternary climate change. Identifying biotic responses to paleoenvironmental variations during the LPIA is important in order to understand how our modern fauna may respond to contemporary climate change. Low-paleolatitude (far-field) marine faunas far from ice centers have been recognized and used as a global proxy for biotic responses to the LPIA, but the biotic responses in high-paleolatitude (near-field) regions close to Gondwanan ice centers have received much less attention. We tested …

Late Paleozoic Glaciation And Ice Sheet Collapse Over Western And Eastern Gondwana: Sedimentology And Stratigraphy Of Glacial To Post-Glacial Strata In Western Argentina And Tasmania, Australia, Lindsey C. Henry

Theses and Dissertations

The late Paleozoic ice age (LPIA; 345-280 million years ago) provides the last complete record of a major deglaciation on a vegetated Earth, and therefore can serve as a proxy for Earth's inevitable transition out of its present glaciated state. This project analyzes climate change during and following the LPIA using two different approaches:

1) Detailed sedimentology analyses of five glacially-influenced formations in Argentina and Australia in order to determine the size and thermal regime of glaciers during the LPIA.

2) An investigation of massive volcanism along the Panthalassan margin of Gondwana as a source of CO2 that may have …