2014-12-12

2014 SPA Contest - María Jesús Rubio de Inglés - Reconstructing the past climate using the lipidic fraction: insights for the future climate.


If you ignore your past, you’ll jeopardize your future… 

It was one of the useful insights given in Star Wars but, it can also be applied to describe the near-future climate scenarios carried out by prestigious climate organizations, like the Inter-Governamental Panel for the Climate Change (IPCC). The present Global Warming is one of the cutting edge topics that is now focussing many scientists but, are we sure that we have not faced any similar climatic trend in the recent climatic past of the Earth? We can use many natural climatic records, like the sediment records retrieved from lakes, to reconstruct past climate oscillations. My name is Maria Jesus Rubio Inglés and the work I am performing at the Institute of Earth Sciences Jaume Almera (ICTJA-CSIC) for my phD thesis is the reconstruction of climatic history for the last 1000 years recorded in Lake Azul (Azores archipelago, Portugal) sediments using the lipidic fraction. The lipids can be produced by bacteria, archaea, tree leaves, or even humans. Each particular fraction of these lipids have been used to track back changes in environmental (pH, human impact) and climatic (temperature, precipitation) oscillations. The different weight of the hydrogen molecules contained in the leaves wax has been used to infer temporal evolution of the amount of precipitation or its origin. In the work presented for ICTJA student presentation Awards, we have used bacterial and archaea lipidic compounds to reconstruct the past temperature in our study site capturing the widely known global warming the last century (Figure). And last, but not least, we are unraveling when humans arrived to Sao Miguel island by analysing the lipids contained on its faeces. All these studies are allowing us to reconstruct climate, environment and history in our Atlantic island and, therefore, to provide both a wider perspective of the present Global Warming and a guide for the future.
The present work has been funded by the projects PALEONAO and RAPIDNAO





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