Research: Graduate Student Profile

 

Snapshots...

Janet Fang
Earth & Environmental Science Journalism , LDEO

B.A., Integrative Biology and English Literature, University of California, Berkeley, 2004

"Having spent all of my under- and post-grad years studying the life sciences, I felt uneasy about joining the earth and environmental sciences; DEES helped me realize that my appreciation of the natural world would have been incomplete had I only known about the players without the larger-scale settings. And I love that Lamont houses an abundance of researchers from seemingly disparate disciplines, who have found creative ways to integrate and apply their studies towards previously unaskable questions. It’s also nice that this delightfully quirky academic institute is set atop a forested bluff overlooking the Hudson River, an asylum resting just a scenic shuttle ride away from Manhattan."

Climate Change and Human Evolution

E&ESJ is a dual degree program requiring two master's projects, one in earth or environmental science and another in journalism. My DEES master's research seeks to provide further constraints on the paleoclimatic context of human evolution by exploring a three-part question: how did the tropical Atlantic east-to-west sea surface temperature gradient develop, and how might this have affected African climate change and hominin (humans and ancestors) evolution since the Pliocene? To that end, I perform geochemical analyses on the planktonic foraminifera species Globigerinoides ruber from marine sediments cored in the equatorial Atlantic. Using Mg/Ca ratios and d¹⁸O, I will reconstruct tropical Atlantic SST gradients as a proxy for African climate change; these zonal reconstructions should correspond with African terrigenous dust records, which are paleoproxies for subtropical African aridity. Major ecological changes in African paleoclimate, in particular, aridification and the shift from woodland to grassland, will be correlated with junctures in hominin evolution. Transitions to arid-adapted plants and fauna should be reflected in hominin diet and locomotion, which can be observed in the fossil record. A better understanding of the paleoclimate forcings that shaped the evolution of Homo species could relate to the biotic effects of future climate change.

Advisors: Kim Kastens, Peter deMenocal, and Alessandra Giannini (IRI), Jill Shapiro (E3B).