NSU’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS) will host its last Intellectual Conversations presentation, scheduled for noon – 1 p.m. Thursday, April 21, 2016. This is the fourth and last in the winter series titled “Truth and Power.” This event will feature Paul Baldauf, Ph.D., faculty in the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences in the Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Oceanography. Baldauf will discuss “Our Changing Landscape in the Face of Drought.”
For more than 150 years, scientists have understood how greenhouse gases warm Earth’s atmosphere. With every earth system showing signs of rapid change, there is near consensus among climate scientists that human activity will change Earth’s climate for the coming millennia. With political and industrial leaders at an impasse on how to respond to the challenge of changing climate, we must prepare to adapt to the inevitable change. Our work focuses on the Great Plains of the U.S., the vast grassland region west of the Mississippi River that has become the breadbasket of our country. Paleoclimatic evidence indicates that in the past 10,000 years the Great Plains has been a desert with vast areas covered in sand dunes. How often this happens, and how long these periods of drought last, is unknown. In this lecture, Baldauf will discuss using sand dune activity on the Northern Great Plains to determine the timing of periods of prolonged drought.
The conversation, which is free and open to the public, will be held in the Cotilla Gallery on the Second Floor of the Alvin Sherman Library on NSU’s Fort Lauderdale/Davie campus.