Celina Suarez
University of Arkansas, AR·Earth & Environmental Science
About 95 million years ago, rising carbon dioxide drove Earth through an extreme warming event called the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum (KTM). Global temperatures rose about three times more than the warming projected for the end of this century.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
Cretaceous Thermal Maximum
hyperthermal
paleoclimate
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2030
What they work on
- Establish a refined chronology of terrestrial ecosystem change across the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, using carbon-isotope chemostratigraphy and radioisotopic dating of zircon, eggshell and pedogenic (soil-formed) carbonates.
- Calculate the rate, duration and magnitude of extinction and recovery among plants and animals preserved in Mongolia's Gobi Basin and North America's Western Interior Basin.
- Reconstruct temperature, precipitation and species habitat requirements during the KTM from geochemical proxies, and assess the trends and drivers of habitat evolution.
- Explore how extreme warming affected ecosystem resilience, food web stability, functional biodiversity and species threat, using open databases of diets, niche guilds, ranges and plant community composition.
More about the research
That makes the KTM a natural experiment for studying how ecosystems respond to rapid, severe warming. Earlier work showed that about 80% of marine life went extinct as oceans warmed and lost oxygen. What happened on land is still largely unknown.
Why it matters
Ecologists and policymakers need real data on how land ecosystems respond to extreme warming, and the rock record of the KTM provides it. Open databases on extinction rates, recovery times and resilience could help identify tipping points for ecosystem decline, and could inform forecasts of which habitats and species are most threatened as Earth's climate warms in the coming century.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Michael King
Western Colorado University, CO·Earth & Environmental Science
Establish a refined chronology of terrestrial ecosystem change across the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum using radioisotopic ages, carbon-isotope chemostratigraphy, eggshell and soil (pedogenic) carbonate, and zircon dating.
Lucien Nana Yobo
Texas A&M University-College Station, TX·Earth & Environmental Science
Determine the timing, duration and eruption rates of the Caribbean Large Igneous Province by U-Pb dating of zircon crystals with CA-ID-TIMS, using ash layers from ocean drilling cores and Colombian field sections.
Brittany Hupp
George Mason University, VA·Earth & Environmental Science
Build records of single-shell foraminifera chemistry and shape across the onset of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) at IODP Site U1580, where shells were not dissolved by ocean acidification.
The school
University of Arkansas: 12 labs on PI Pages, $231M a year on research, 179 research doctorates a year.
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