Tag Archives: Planktonic foraminifera

Limits to transfer function precision

Posted on 09/04/2015 by richard telford

Transfer functions are widely used to reconstruct past environmental conditions from fossil assemblages using the relationship between species and the environment in a modern calibration set. Naturally, palaeoecologists want to generate reconstructions that are as precise as possible, and take … Continue reading →

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Thoughts on tipping points relevant to Praetorius & Mix (2014)

Posted on 26/07/2014 by richard telford

Tipping points are scary. The response of climate and other environmental systems to external forcing might not be a gradual, reversible change but a flip from one stable state to another. It may be very difficult to reverse this transition. … Continue reading →

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Ceci n’est pas un thermomètre

Posted on 17/05/2014 by richard telford

With apologies to Magritte.

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My presentation at EGU2014

Posted on 02/05/2014 by richard telford

Getting into the right session at EGU is partly a matter of luck. This year I was in session CL2.2 “Paleoclimates from the Cretaceous to the Holocene: learning from numerical experiments and model-data comparisons” and was lucky to follow two … Continue reading →

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Perhaps the most depressing palaeoecology paper ever

Posted on 20/04/2014 by richard telford

One of the major rationales for palaeoecological analyses is to provide data that can be used to validate climate models — if the models can predict past climate from periods with different climate forcings our confidence in their projections of future climate … Continue reading →

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Status of palaeoceanographic transfer functions

Posted on 02/10/2013 by richard telford

A wide variety of microfossil groups have been used to generate quantitative reconstructions of palaeoceanographic conditions. This post lists the species groups used, the variables reconstructed with them, with some comments on the availability of the data. This list is … Continue reading →

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What do planktonic foraminifera care about?

Posted on 23/03/2013 by richard telford

Planktonic foraminifera, oceanic amoeba-like single-celled organisms that produce a calcareous shell or test, are often well preserved in ocean sediments. Some foram species are characteristic of cold water, others live only in warm water. Consequently, foram assemblages that accumulate in … Continue reading →

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