Ian Straits ‘25 On His Research Conference
My name is Ian Straits, I am a Junior Chemical Engineering major from Frederick, Maryland. This summer I took a step to broaden my knowledge base in the world of geochemistry. Doing research under Dr. Lorelei Curtin, I time traveled into the past learning about the climate history and geological variability of the Lofoten Islands in Norway. Did I really time travel? The shower answer is no, but through the use of molecules found in sediment, I was able to unravel the past climate looking at temperature, fire history, and vegetation type.
The Lofoten Islands have a long history of Norse activity, spanning almost 5000 years. Due to it being just inside the Arctic Circle, the area is subject to an extremely volatile climate. This has been a major driver of Norse history, affecting migration, agriculture, and the entire civilization as a whole. The goal of my research was to better understand the relationship between environmental changes that have occurred over the Holocene (11,000 years to present) and what that means through the lens of Norse civilization.
Sediment at the bottom of a lake forms chronological layers. The older the sediment, the deeper it is. In 2017, Dr. Lorelei Curtin and her colleagues traveled to Norway and collected a core section of a lake called Ostadvatnet. This core was then carbon-dated and fractionated into lipid samples that could be analyzed for different proxies.
Here is where I came in and started working. One of these proxies uses the leaf wax of plants to determine what type of vegetation existed at a specific time. The chain length of n-alkanes can be indicative of different types of plants. We can then use this to infer conditions of the climate and agricultural techniques at specific times. This proxy was compared with 4 other Paleo proxies to create an ensemble of this area's history.
Here are the main findings of my research. Around 3000 years before present, Norse activity in this area started to pick up. They began burning grasses in a form of slash and burn agriculture. This was evident in the vegetation changes and fire history. Then following an initial growth, there was a period of migration and a pause in activity as the warm period of the late iron age caused Norse civilizations to move out of that area. Starting again from 1500 years ago to present there has been a steady increase in activity as we again see a return of field grasses and a decline in trees, an effect of deforestation, evident with human activity.
I was fortunate enough, thanks to the Geology and Chemical Engineering departments, to present my research at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. This was an incredible opportunity where I was able to present these findings to a professional community as well as learn cutting-edge developments in the world of earth and space science.
