The mountains of Antarctica, lying several thousand feet below the ice, as detected by radar. Image courtesy of Michael Studinger, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory
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| Geologist Jeff Vervoort with a 1.86-billion-year-old piece of gneiss he found near Clarkia, Idaho, typical of the rocks at the core of the ancient supercontinent of Rodinia. |
Jeff Vervoort’s research is running hot and cold, in a good way.
Last week, he contributed to a paper in Science showing tropical rain forest biological diversity went up, not down, during a period of global warming 56.3 million years ago.
Now he’s going on an extended expedition on the bottom of the earth to put a finer point on the age and origin of the Antarctic continent.
Read more about the work of this WSU associate professor in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Washington State Magazine’s Discovery blog, titled “Journey to the Bottom of the Earth.”
Related:
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Science article, 11-12-2010, “Effects of Rapid Global Warming at the Paleocene-Eocene Boundary on Neotropical Vegetation”