Date & Time: April 3rd, 1 PM
Location: Lamont Comer Seminar Room, 1st Floor (with cookies and hot beverages)
Zoom: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/94990498089
Passcode: turkana
Perspectives on Paleoenvironments: Views from the Turkana Basin
Environmental character and change are influenced by a wide range of factors over different spatial and temporal scales. The Turkana Basin of eastern Africa provides a useful glimpse into a wide range of environmental settings produced under different tectonic and climatic regimes, with accessory perturbations from volcanism, landscape evolution and biotic processes. The interplay between environmental variables may also yield more complex scenarios and complicate efforts to unravel environmental drivers. Using a variety of perspectives from Miocene through Recent landscapes in Turkana, a subset of environmental settings associated with human evolution and the development of the savanna ecosystem can be sketched. These provide a useful framework in which to consider what we know and what avenues merit further investigation.
Craig Feibel is a geologist interested in the context of evolution, and his work has focused on sites within the African rift system through the later Cenozoic. He is primarily a stratigrapher and sedimentologist and has collaborated on studies of hominid localities, archaeological sites and their setting within the rift. He has also taught field geology in Turkana for several programs since 1985.
