Cambios ambientales en el registro geológico: el uso de la paleoecología para el mundo actual y futuro

Today’s world is changing at a speed and with a magnitude that calls into question the viability of Earth’s systems with regard to dealing with this new situation. The projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the end of this century are a well-known example of this changing trend. Geological records provide indispensable information on how systems have changed over time and what the cause or causes have been for these changes. Thus, the study of sedimentary archives represents the only empirical research tool that enables us to discover how the Earth’s systems behave in the face of worrying events which can be used to understand the response of current systems and to predict the future. In this lecture, the speaker will also be presenting a few specific examples of paleoecological research devised to study the dynamics of vegetation in the face of events such as volcanic eruptions and climate change in past times.