A happy Greg Wiles on the shore of Glacier Bay, Alaska.
(by Stephanie Jarvis, ’11)
Professor Greg Wiles, the Ross K. Shoolroy Chair of Natural Resources at Wooster, finished off the series of Wooster presentations at this year’s Geological Society of America Annual Meeting with his talk: “Multi-millenial-scale tree ring records from Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve: Paleoenvironmental reconstruction and placing ongoing cryosphere-ecosphere changes into a long-term context”. He presented this work in a session on research in National Parks this morning. Highlighting this study with Dan Lawson and Wooster students in the park and surrounding area (see the Alaska tag for this blog), Greg described the timing of glacial advances and retreats as determined by dendrochronology, and the applications of these results to understanding the history of the native Tlingit people. As the National Parks belong to everybody, and our projects are often funded by government agencies (i.e., taxpayers), the communication of this research in a coherent and understandable manner is one of the many duties of scientists and a great way to close out the 2010 Annual GSA Meeting!
