CLIMATOLOGY

PHY 112 Climatology TEST 3 ESSAY Due Thursday, December 13, 2018 at 9 p.m

Late essays will not be accepted under ANY circumstances!

Your paper must be 3 – 5 pages in length. Answer all numbered questions for the time period that you choose. Use Times New Roman font, double spaced, with one inch margins. You

MUST cite two outside REPUTABLE sources on a “Works-cited” page at the end of your essay (see http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/). You must also cite your sources within

the essay itself.

Submit your completed essay as a Word document under the TURNITIN link on the main website.

Please choose one of the following paleoclimate events to cover in your paper:

• Huronian glaciation followed by the Great Oxygenation event (2.5 billion years ago) • Permian–Triassic extinction event (PT extinction, 250 million years ago) • Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction (KT extinction, 66 million years ago) • Last Glacial Maximum (LGM: 25,000 years ago)

In your essay, please answer the following questions:

1. What was the Earth’s climate like during this time? Please address parameters such as temperature, precipitation, ice sheet extent, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, etc.

2. How do we know what the climate was like? Is there any physical evidence (like layers in the soil, fossils) for these events? What kind of proxies are used to study this time period?

3. What happened to lead the Earth in to your chosen event (for example: asteroid impact, volcanic eruption, changes in Earth’s orbit, changes in the biosphere affecting the atmosphere)?

4. How did your chosen climate event affect the biosphere? If there was a mass extinction, how long did it take and what percent of species perished? Why did certain species perish and why did certain species survive?

5. What happened to lead the Earth out of those climate conditions? How long did your chosen climate event last?

On “Reputable” vs “Not Reputable”

A reputable source is a source which has either gone through the peer-review process (ie an academic paper), or was written for the general (non-scientific) public by scientists who regularly undergo the peer-review process. Examples of the latter include: websites for a government funded scientific agency (NASA, NOAA, USGS, ESA, US Weather Service), a university website, textbooks, popular press articles produced by reputable scientific publishers such as Scientific American, Discover, Popular Science, Physics Today, and professional scientific climate reports (like the United Nations IPCC reports).

You can also find sources in an academic database. Academic databases are collections of articles, textbooks, news releases, etc, which have been vetted. You have access to several academic databases through the Bergen Community College library, including Academic

Search Premier and ProQuest Research Library. To access these databases, go here and then log in to your Bergen account: https://bergen.edu/current-students/student-support-services/ library/.

Some examples of sources which are generally not reputable include: personal blogs, news websites, social media, or anything written that does not properly source its original claims

You cannot cite Wikipedia; however, Wikipedia can be a great tool to get a general idea of your chosen topic. You can then evaluate the sources used by Wikipedia to determine whether they are reputable or not. If you determine that the source is reputable, you must cite that source originally, NOT the Wikipedia page.

Here are some websites that are reputable sources and have lots of useful paleoclimate information:

https://bergen.edu/current-students/student-support-services/library/ (This would be my first stop) https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/paleoclimatology-data https://www2.usgs.gov/climate_landuse/clu_rd/paleoclimate/

This is a great list of sources and there is lots of discussion on what makes each source reputable: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/start-here/