Evie Sanford | 2026 I.S. Symposium
Name: Evie Sanford
Title: Exploring New Information from an Old Archive: A Record of Abrupt Climate Change from Brown鈥檚 Lake
Major: Environmental Geoscience
Advisor: Eva Lyon
From a warming world, the Younger Dryas presents a return to near-glacial conditions that persisted for around 1,300 years. Known for its abrupt cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, this period is seen through global proxy records such as lake sediments. Lake records provide a way to uncover past environmental conditions hidden within ancient sediment such as changes in pH, temperature, and nutrient abundance. Within Ohio, the Younger Dryas is sparsely studied, leaving large research gaps. This study presents geochemical, lithologic, and diatom analyses from Brown鈥檚 Lake, Wayne County, Ohio to help discover how the lake documents the time leading up to and during the Younger Dryas. This analysis provides further understanding of large-scale climate change events to help improve our understanding of the Earth鈥檚 climate system and to help predict future climate changes. The transition from into the Younger Dryas showed intermittent influxes of aeolian sedimentation, a change to an alkaline environment indicated by lack of diatom preservation shown physically through slides and chemostratigraphically through the Si/Ti and Si/Al ratios, and magnetic susceptibility peaks at coarser sediments and a drastic relative decrease that corresponds to a deposition of black mud. Climate is a complex, ever changing system that affects every aspect of life. Understanding even just a small piece through a lacustrine system in Ohio helps join together the large, complex puzzle that is climate.
Posted in Symposium 2026 on May 1, 2026.
