Recent News
I delivered a talk at the European Geosciences Union annual meeting in the African Paleoclimate special session and immediately after returning to the US flew to Tuscon to deliver an invited talk for the departmental Geosciences Colluquim. Both talks were focusing on the 'new' lake-level curve for Lake Malawi that I developed by combining the diatom and screenwash datasets from drillcore 1C (to be discussed more completely in the manuscript which has been submitted to a special voume of PPP). I gave a related talk in June at the DOSECC meeting in Snowbird, UT.
Our recent publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about 'megadrought' (~100,000 years ago) in the southern tropics of Africa and the potential impacts on early human migration patterns - reconstructed from the sediments of Lake Malawi - has sparked a lot of public interest. This has resulted in interviews in the Times of London, and, soon, an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
I recently (October 2007) delivered a talk at the Paleontological Society Short Course on "Geological and Environmental Applications of the Diatoms" at this year's Geological Society of America Conference in Denver. My talk discussed how diatoms have been used in marginal riverine environments to reconstruct past river hydrology, chemistry, and health. Part of the talk included my own work on the Flathead River/Lake Basin in Montana and the evidence of seasonality and 20th-century disturbance in the Flathead and Swan Rivers reconstructed from diatoms in a short core taken from the northern basin of Flathead Lake.
The development of the diatom community forum and wiki is now underway, although it is currently
being housed on a temporary server. The site is now online, and functional, but has not yet been seeded
with any data, as the templates and general layout are still being designed. If you are interested in
helping with The Diatom Wiki, please contact me via email. 
Recent & Upcoming Publications
A special issue of Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology entitled "Southern Hemisphere Tropical Climate over the Past 150 ka: Results of the Lake Malawi Scientific Drilling Project" is currently being assembled and will include a manuscript (submitted) on the Late Pleistocene diatom-inferred paleohydrography of the Central Basin of Lake Malawi. Final (peer-reviewed, revised) manuscripts are slated for submission for print by May 15th and should be published later this year.
A new paper on Foy Lake has been submitted to QSR; I am one of many co-authors on the paper with Bryan Shuman, who went into the field with us in 2002 to collect a transect series of cores. The paper discusses the changes in sedimentation and erosional surfaces that corroborate many of the diatom-inferred changes in lake level I reported from my dissertation. The manuscript also includes records from several other lakes in the Rocky Mountain region showing similar lake-level changes.
I am currently working on a publication with Matthew Julius (St. Cloud) on the description of a new species
of diatom present in the fossil material from Lake Malawi. This new form closely resembles Cyclotella meneghiniana
but differs through the presence of several significant features. The manuscript is currently still in preparation for
submission. 
Our paper on the diatom stratigraphy of Crevice Lake, Montana is now published and can be downloaded here.
Our PNAS paper titled "Ecological consequences of early Late Pleistocene megadroughts in tropical Africa" has been published along with a sister article from our research group (Scholz et al.) showing that the Late Pleistocene megadroughts observed in Lake Malawi were a pan-African event, at least for lakes seasonally exposed to the Intertropical Convergence Zone.
My paper entitled "Using diatoms as ecological and paleoecological indicators in riverine environments",
from the Paleontological Society of America Short Course, has now been published.
Click here for more information
on the Paleontological Society Papers vol. 13.
Our Geology paper entitled "Multi-decadal drought and Holocene climate instability in the Rocky Mountains" was published in May of 2006. A PDF of the article can be downloaded HERE.
Last updated: May 5, 2008
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