Contact information:

Dr. David Black

School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences

Stony Brook University

Stony Brook, NY  11794-5000

Office:  631-632-8676

Lab: 631-632-3076

Email: david.black@stonybrook.edu

    The Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology lab’s faculty and students are currently working on projects in the Cariaco Basin (Venezuela), the Santa Barbara Basin (California), and are planning studies on the oxygen minimum zone in the eastern tropical North Pacific Ocean.  One of the main goals of our lab is to reconstruct what climate was like in the past to better understand the mechanisms that create climate change and how different regions respond to those changes.  We are particularly interested in exploring interannual– to subcentennial-scale variability as these are the time scales on which human-induced climate change is expected to occur.

    Past ocean and atmosphere variability can be reconstructed from a variety of natural archives.  We use the materials preserved in marine sediments collected from the deep ocean floor to create records of sea surface temperature, trade wind and Intertropical Convergence Zone variability, hydrographic conditions, and regional teleconnections.  The reconstructions are based on a combination of micropaleontology, stable isotopes, and trace metal geochemistry.

Sediment traps about to be deployed in the Cariaco Basin, Venezuela.