Tag: Phil Jardine

Phil’s research focuses on large-scale ecological patterns and processes in the fossil record. He has just completed a PhD at the University of Birmingham, UK, in which he used the early Palaeogene pollen and spore record of the southeastern United States to document the responses of plant communities to long-term climate change. His next research project will focus on the pollen record of the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming, studying the impact of rapid climate change across the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum on the formerly subtropical plants of the US Western Interior. An MSc project at the University of Bristol, UK, has also led to an on-going collaboration to determine the evolutionary causes of high-crowned teeth in grassland mammalian herbivores.

Aside from research, Phil enjoys playing the guitar, mandolin and banjo, as well as cooking, reading, walking and (as pictured) taking afternoon tea.

Contact Details:

Phil Jardine, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, United Kingdom.

Oct12011

Patterns in Palaeontology: The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum

Patterns in Palaeontology
by Phil Jardine*1 Introduction: The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) is one of the most intense and abrupt intervals of global warming in the geological record. It occurred around 56 million years ago, at the boundary between the Paleocene and Eocene epochs. This warming has been linked to a similarly rapid increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, which acted to trap heat and drive up global temperatures by more than 5 °C in just a few thousand years. The fossil record gives us the means of understanding how life was affected by the PETM, and so provides an excellent opportunity to study the relationships between evolution, extinction, migration and climate change. The early Palaeogene world: At the time of the PETM, the world was already much w...
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