Core Ideas - The Paleolimnology Podcast

In episode 12 of the Core Ideas podcast we begin to explore paleolimnology, and the questions paleolimnology can address, in the popular media. We briefly consider how news and other media have covered environmental topics such as eutrophication, acidification, climate change, and other emerging stressors, like road salt application.

In this episode of Core Ideas, we continue Into the Weeds of paleolimnology by examining some of the not-so-secret societies and associations that count many paleolimnologists among their membership.

In the 10th episode of the Core Ideas podcast we welcome a special guest for the first time. Jennifer Korosi is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at York University, where her research uses paleolimnological methods to answer a range of research questions related to environmental change across Canada. In this episode, continuing our arc going "Into the Weeds", we explore the wa...

This week on the Core Ideas podcast our journey Into the Weeds of paleolimnology continues with a look at the graduate student experience. Using our own experiences we explore questions like: Why try research? What is the difference between BSc, MSc and PhD projects? Does it matter whether you join a large or small lab group? We even touch on what it means to be a postdoc...

The second episode of our Into the Weeds podcast arc covers how important advances in computing during the late 1970s and early 1980s were to paleolimnology. Increased access to personal computers, prompted rapid developments in statistical tools and software. Many of the programs and approaches commonly used in the analysis of sediment cores have their roots in this time period. We also appreciat...

With a basic vocabulary established by our Fundamentals arc, the Core Ideas podcast will now delve deeper Into the Weeds on a variety of paleolimnological topics. Our second arc begins with some reflections on the fieldwork necessary to collect the lake sediments that are brought back to the laboratory for study.

In this episode of the Core Ideas podcast, our introduction to paleolimnology is concluded with a discussion about using indicators preserved in lake sediments to produce environmental reconstructions. We cover why environmental reconstructions are useful, how calibration sets are used to produce transfer functions that are able to transfer knowledge of the modern environment “downcore” and infer...

In this instalment of the Core Ideas podcast, Adam and Josh continue exploring the fundamentals of paleolimnology by discussing some physical and chemical indicators that preserve in lake sediments. Given this very broad topic, we organized it (poorly) into categories based on the overall analytical approach, such as measurements performed on complete sediment cores, inorganic geochemical methods,...

In the fourth episode of Core Ideas, we examine the retrieval of the mud critical to paleolimnology (i.e. sediment cores) from the lake bottom with minimal disturbance. Usually, sediment cores are collected from a platform at the lake surface, such as a canoe, boat, the floats of a helicopter/plane, or even the ice of a frozen lake, and as discussed last time, sediment cores of similar length vary...

In the third episode of Core Ideas, we examine our dating struggles... with sediment cores! This discussion explores relative markers of sediment age, the radioisotopes commonly used by paleolimnologists (Pb-210, C-14, Cs-137), along with a few more exotic dating methods.

In the second episode of Core Ideas, Adam and Josh discuss bioindicators - species or communities that are so closely associated with particular environmental conditions that their presence can be used to infer whether those conditions have occurred in the history of a lake.

We're live (pre-recorded)! Welcome to the introductory episode of Core Ideas - a Paleolimnology Podcast.