nai

Project Progress

We have initiated our study of Fayetteville, Green Lake, a meromictic lake in New York State, as a modern analogue of the Proterozoic ocean. We are collecting data on water-column structure, nutrient and trace metal profiles, microbial diversity, water-column pigment distributions, and their transformation into biomarkers in the sediment.

Theoretical work has focused on the onset and behavior of anoxic oceans (with application to the Precambrian and certain intervals of the Phanerozoic). We find that the chemocline separating deep anoxic and sulfidic waters from oxygenated surface waters is subject to collapse, especially under the lowered atmospheric oxygen concentrations of the Precambrian.