. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. Paleoecology is much more varied than studying tree rings, but you get the idea: Nature remembers. Most of nature's clues to the past aren't initially obvious. The history of forests, swamps and even seas is entombed in ecological remnants — pollen grains, chemical traces, river sediments, microscopic fossils. The paleoecologist's job is to scoop up these shards of the past and put them back together. Until 1979, when Cooper's mentor, Grace Brush at Johns Hopkins University, traced the history of human inf
. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. Paleoecology is much more varied than studying tree rings, but you get the idea: Nature remembers. Most of nature's clues to the past aren't initially obvious. The history of forests, swamps and even seas is entombed in ecological remnants — pollen grains, chemical traces, river sediments, microscopic fossils. The paleoecologist's job is to scoop up these shards of the past and put them back together. Until 1979, when Cooper's mentor, Grace Brush at Johns Hopkins University, traced the history of human influence on the Chesapeake Bay, few marine scientists believed that paleoecological methods would work in estuaries. They assumed that strong currents and tides would scatter sediments, wear away fossils, wash pollen out to sea. In the Chesapeake, Brush showed that she could successfully profile ecological changes dating back far earlier than the first European colonists. Later, Brush and Cooper teamed up to do a pathbreaking study of anoxia in the Chesapeake Bay, published in the journal Science in 1991. Now Cooper is using a similar approach in North Carolina. With the support of the Water Resources Research Institute, she has begun to document the history of water quality in the Neuse and Pamlico estuaries. In the summer of 1997, she collected 2 3/4- to 5-foot sediment cores from seven sites. She divided her samples into 2-centimeter sections and dated them using lead-210, cesium-137 and radiocarbon techniques. The sediments are deposited on the estuary bottom a little bit every year, leaving a stratigraphic record that starts with the present at the top layer and goes back in time through the deeper sediments. Her deepest samples were laid down about 2,000 years ago. To analyze the estuarine sediments, Cooper uses her full box of paleo- ecologist's tools. I found several of her methods ingenious. One involves collecting pollen fossils preserved in the sediments. Ragwee
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookcollectionunclibra, booksubjectoceanography
