November 10, 2014 — Cutting-edge research to understand fluctuations in sea levels caused by climate change looks like this: In a spartan, fluorescent-lighted laboratory, Tufts University researchers peer through microscopes to count microorganisms that resemble tiny snails.
These simple marsh-dwelling creatures called foraminifera, or forams, are choosy about how much time they spend underwater, so they turn out to be surprisingly precise indicators of ancient sea levels.
The unsophisticated foram census at Tufts shows that the quest to understand the impact of global-scale climate change can sometimes depend on fairly mundane clues.
Unlike many climate predictions, which describe average changes over the entire globe, tallying up forams to understand past sea level changes can provide clues to help predict the future on a smaller scale — narrowing the focus to specific regions and shorter time frames.
“The problem we have with predictions is our obsession with the year 2100 — that’s of little to no use for someone planning for the city of Boston,” said Andrew Kemp, assistant professor of geology at Tufts who has counted up tens of thousands of forams over the years.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe