Fire in the Library: Arctic warming, coastal erosion, and the catastrophic loss of scientific and cultural understanding
North at Trent 2017 lecture series
Event Details
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Thursday, April 6, 2017
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Building: Traill College
Room: Bagnani Hall
Cost: Free
The North at Trent 2017 Lecture Series wraps up with Dr. Ben Fitzhugh Director, Quaternary Research Center & Associate Professor, Anthropology, University of Washington:
Fire in the Library: Arctic warming, coastal erosion, and the catastrophic loss of scientific and cultural understanding
Arctic and subarctic regions contain numerous archaeological sites where organic preservation is spectacular due to the cold climate. In addition to artifacts left by past humans, these sites contain ‘archives’ of plants and animals often in deep chronological sequences and spanning millennia. In this paper, we explore the value of these archaeological archives as “distributed observation networks of the past” and consider case examples from Iceland, Eastern and Northern Canada, Alaska and the Russian Far East. Well-dated archaeological faunal samples subject to morphological, isotopic, and genetic methods shed light on long-term ecosystem evolution in the context of climate changes more extreme than any recorded in the instrumental and historical records of recent centuries. New techniques make it possible to examine changes in productivity, food web dynamics, stock structure, population bottlenecks, extinctions, and population range shifts that can be compared to other records of climate and environmental change. Increasingly these records are being compared systematically across regions in ways that make it possible to explore coupled climate-ocean-ecosystem dynamics over large spatial scales and through century and millennial time scales. The cases presented have been brought into comparison thanks to collaborative work by the Paleoecology of Subarctic Seas (PESAS), North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO), the Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (IHOPE), and the Global Human Ecodynamics Aliance (GHEA).
This event is open to the public and free of charge. There will be a reception to follow.
The North at Trent 2017 Lecture Series is sponsored by the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies, the Roberta Bondar Fellowship in Northern & Polar Studies and Jon & Shelagh Grant.