Given the restrictions of the present Covid-19 situation we’d like to welcome you to an online salon in an effort to reconstitute our archaeological community in virtual space. We’ll be hosting a series of informal presentations, working papers and discussions on fridays during April and early May. Please join us for cocktails and archaeological conversation. Instructions for how to participate are below.

For our first salon we’ll be hosting Professor Dorothy Peteet of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. She’ll be discussing her recent research on the marshes of the Hudson Valley and how they are being affected by climate change and human impact.

We look forward to seeing you soon!

Prof. Dorothy Peteet
NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University

Climate and Anthropogenic Controls on New York Estuary Blue Carbon and its Future

4.10pm on Zoom – details below

Hudson River marshes are particularly valuable components of the estuary for their biodiversity, nursery habitat for fisheries, water purification, carbon sequestration, paleoclimatic archives, and heavy metal capture. Yet they are threatened by invasive species, nitrogen pollution, intense storms, and sea level rise. It is vital for the marshes to retain both their structure and function despite these challenges. To help us understand how the marshes have accumulated over millennia, their carbon sequestration through time, and how best to ensure their resilience in the future, we have examined sediment cores from a transect of Hudson River marshes from Stockport Creek upriver to Jamaica Bay, NYC. We utilize multi- proxy methods to examine organic and inorganic components of the sediment, including loss- on-ignition, pollen and spore analysis, macrofossil analysis, X-ray fluorescence, and isotopes of C and N. We will present decadal results over centuries from several marsh investigations and illustrate the controls of natural variability and human-induced change. 

To participate please email archaeology@columbia.edu with your full name, phone number and email address by the 9th April. We will send you the Zoom meeting ID and password 30 minutes before the presentation.