I'm Laura Cotton, and I'm a micropaleontologist
here at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
I collected fossils when I was a kid, and
I basically just kept on doing that.
I took a degree in Geology and did a PhD in
forams, and now I have a job in forams.
Forams are single-celled organisms which have
a calcareous shell, and they live in the ocean.
Most forams will fit into the eye of a needle.
They look a little bit like dust when you
look at them on a table.
Actually, if I sneeze when I'm working, they'll
all disappear.
Forams have a really long fossil record, and
they have a really good fossil record.
Because they're so small, you get a lot of
them preserved in the sediments underneath
the oceans.
Researchers use forams to work out climate
in the past.
As they form their shell, they record a little
bit of that ocean chemistry in the shell.
And what you can do with this, is if you have
a long record of them, you can look at this,
and see how it changes with time.
The Eocene is from 33.7 million years ago
to 56 million years ago.
Researchers are interested in the climate
of the Eocene because it was much warmer than
today,
And it also had higher CO2 in the atmosphere
compared to today.
And so it's a really good analogy for looking
at future global warming scenarios.
In this study, what we did was we analyzed
the forams from the equator, and we
found that the tropical regions were about
6°C warmer in the Eocene than today.
And what we did with this data is used it
to recalculate previous studies.
This showed us that the polar warming was
also much more than expected, according to
some climate models.
In terms of current and future climate, that
has some important implications, because a
lot of a lot of the climate models previously
thought that the poles weren't going to warm
as much in the Eocene.
If they're warming much more in the Eocene
than we expected, then they're probably also
going to warm more than expected in future
scenarios.
