Elizabeth Griffith

Biography

Liz came out west from the town of St. Louis, Missouri to Stanford University.  With a background in geology from the University of Missouri-Rolla (GO MINERS!!), she worked as a field engineer both in Bakersfield, California and the cold, gray and wet Aberdeen, Scotland for two years (June 2000-July 2002) before realizing that her future was here in the Paytan Lab in sunny California pursuing a Ph.D. in paleoceanography.

At the University of Missouri-Rolla, Liz was involved with the Opportunities for Undergraduate Research Experience at the Department of Geology and Geophysics in the Schools of Mines and Metallurgy at UMR.  She worked with other students assisting a graduate student from University of Western Cape, South Africa conduct a seismic survey investigating aquifers in the Western Cape Region of South Africa (Summer 1999).  She also conducted individual research of core samples from Northwestern Missouri for correlation and paleoecological studies in preparation for publication in the Missouri Academy of Sciences (2000).

In 2008, Liz completed her Ph.D. Thesis: Seawater Calcium Isotopes and the Cenozoic Carbonate Depositional History of the Oceans.

*Curriculum Vita*

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Project Description

Carbonate Accumulation and Dissolution Events and the Seawater Calcium Isotope Record

Calcium carbonate sedimentation in the ocean represents the largest calcium and carbon sink in the combined atmosphere, biosphere, and ocean system, thus connecting the global carbon and calcium cycles. Determining fluctuations in calcium carbonate sedimentation over climate transitions provides important information on how the coupled calcium-carbon biogeochemical system behaves and reveals feedbacks between processes that control it. The calcium isotope records of two periods of extreme change in the global calcite compensation depth (CCD) and climate over the Cenozoic, the Eocene-Oligocene Transition (EOT) and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), will be examined at high resolution using marine (pelagic) barite. Large fluctuations in the CCD may be reflected in seawater Ca concentrations and Ca isotopic composition resulting from short term imbalances in marine Ca sources and sinks.