Stromberg Lab Page

Team Costa Rica has moved on from Santa Rosa to Rincon de la Vieja, another of the amazing areas preserved within the Area Conservacion de Guanacaste (ACG). Here, we are sampling soils from very diverse vegetation types; rain forest vegetation to grassy shrublands. With every twist and turn on the trail the forest changes dramatically.

Photos taken by Melanie Conner

"Team Stromberg" below is more aptly named "Team Montana", as opposed to "Team Costa Rica". From now on...

On June 29, teams Stromberg and Sheldon/Smith headed to the Late Oligocene section Everson Creek. Undergraduate Erik Fredrickson will study this beautiful section, which will tell us about what happened to vegetation during the end-Oligocene warming. It took two days to knock it off--the students worked very hard!

On June 28, our co-PIs from U of Michigan, Selena Smith (paleobotany) and Nathan Sheldon (fossil soils/isotope geochemistry) joined us at RRC and helped finish up our localities. At night we headed to Dillon for some laundry and local cuisine... including, for the students, Rocky Mtn Oysters.

Team Stromberg spent three days (June 25-27) at Railroad Canyon, completing sampling of the lowermost sections. The students stayed at the campsite in Leadore City Park, while Caroline Stromberg stayed with Freddy and her parents in law (who had come to help take care of Freddy) at the Homestead Motel in Leadore, ID, with 90 inhabitants.

From the rock samples we will take, we can extract plant silica which can tell us about how vegetation changed during this interval and we can measure carbon isotopes which tell us about climate. This is the first real field day and everyone's still getting their bearings, learning how to GPS, measure section, take rock samples and so on. And it's a hard section!

Then, on June 25, team Stromberg drove to Railroad Canyon (RRC), which is situated on the border between MT and ID to look at and collect rocks of (Early-)Middle Miocene age (~18-14 million years old). We are interested in these rocks because the Middle Miocene was the warmest interval in Earth's history in the last 35 million years.

Team Costa Rica made great progress sampling today before the torrential down pour began. There is enough light to work here by 5 am, but its completely dark by 6 pm. The rain starts around 3 and the food is amazing here at La Selva!