Online seminar by Alena Kimbrough from University of Wollingong
30 May 2025
KST 16:00
The Online seminar is being held in Room 1010 (Jasmin) – Integrated mechanical engineering building. Click here for the campus map.
We invite you to join us on Friday, May 30 2025 at 16:00 KST with speaker Dr. Alena Kimbrough from the University of Wollongong. This online speleothem lecture series at the IBS Center for Climate Physics, Busan, South Korea welcomes participation from colleagues from all career paths.
Abstract:
Stalagmites from South Sulawesi caves have proven to be invaluable recorders of past Indo-Australian monsoon rainfall and environmental conditions in a region known as the ‘heat engine’ of the Earth’s atmospheric circulation. Geochemical measurements extracted from Sulawesi stalagmite growth layers, including stable isotopes and trace elements, have provided detailed clues to environmental and climatic conditions spanning multiple glacial-interglacial cycles. Coeval Sulawesi stalagmite records show excellent reproducibility, making it possible to identify shared change points, combine chronological uncertainties, and isolate the most probable age constraints for major hydrological shifts during glacial-interglacial transitions. Furthermore, comparison of transition metals to d18O and d13C in the Sulawesi speleothem records enables us to differentiate between periods when vegetation productivity increased in response to a rise in temperature/CO2, and periods when changing hydroclimate played a more dominant role. Micro-imaging techniques are also being explored to better understand the environmental signals recorded in Sulawesi stalagmites.
Bio: Ali Kimbrough is an Associate Research Fellow at the University of Wollongong. After completing her Bachelor of Science in Earth Systems Science at the University of Arizona, she moved to Australia to take on a PhD at the Australian National University Research School of Earth Sciences. She was awarded her PhD in 2017 for her research on tropical speleothem paleoclimatology. Post PhD, Ali worked in Research Management for three years, with a brief foray into consulting, before returning to academia in late 2020. In addition to generating new climate reconstructions from Indonesian speleothems, Ali is working with collaborators to further develop these unique archives using transition metals as paleoclimate indicators, reconstructing temperature, and exploring novel micro-imaging techniques to accompany records of environmental change.
Time: May 30, 2025, 16:00 PM Seoul
Link: https://pusan.zoom.us/j/84384354162?pwd=7UqdT08kdvCvfFRuGajRSihAmRyUAt.1
Meeting ID: 843 8435 4162
Passcode: 233635
We encourage you to share the meeting link with your peers. As always, please let us know if you have any questions or concerns!
We hope to e-see you there!
Best,
The Speleothem Group
IBS Center for Climate Physics