“地球科学前沿”学术报告第2018-02期
应mobile48-365365王金荣教授和郭雪莲副教授邀请，美国俄勒冈大学地球科学院Greg Retallack教授来我校进行学术交流，欢迎广大师生积极参加！
报告题目: GLOBAL COOLING BY GRASSLANDS IN THE GEOLOGICAL PAST AND NEAR FUTURE
报告人：Greg Retallack 教授
时间：2018年3月30日（星期五）14：30
地点：榆中校区天山堂B104
报告人简介：
Greg Retallack is professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Oregon in Eugene. He obtained a PhD at the University of New England in Australia, and enjoyed a postdoc at Indiana University. He is best known for the study of fossil soils (paleosols) ranging in age from Quaternary back to Archean.
He has published 8 papers in Science and Nature, among 263 published papers and 10 books. He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America and the American Association of Science. His awards include the Stillwell Medal of the Geological Society of Australia and the Ingerson Medal of the Geochemical Society.
His talk will address how, over the past 40 million years, grasslands coevolved from a series of mutual adaptations in grasses and mammals to create unique soils of grasslands called Mollisols, evident from paleosols by 19 million years ago. These soils and ecosystems with their high organic content, low transpiration and high albedo were a force for global cooling. Grassland coevolution thus provides a biological rather than tectonic or oceanic mechanism for planetary cooling culminating in Quaternary ice ages. Modern agriculture is based on grassland ecosystems, and a variety of farming techniques known as carbon farming can be used to offset current global warming due to fossil fuel consumption.
