Colombia Calling - Living And Working In Colombia

558: Back to the (microscopic) Future: Using Palaeontology, Pollen, and AI to predict and protect our futures

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Sinopsis

Today, we go back many millennia in order to protect ourselves for the coming centuries: Emily Hart speaks to two Colombian scientists, Carlos Jaramillo and Camila Martínez, time-travellers of the smallest imaginable time machines: fossilised pollen and tree cells.    Climate change has been a constant feature of Planet Earth: at points in history, the planet has been both much cooler and much warmer than it is today - if we know which plants occupied an ecosystem the last time the Earth was a certain temperature or had a certain level of CO2 in the atmosphere, we can predict what our ecosystems will look like in the conditions that we will soon be living in.  Using tiny fossilised clues, Carlos and Camila are doing exactly this.  The climate change we are currently living through is unprecedented in speed – and water and rain cycles are a major concern for humanity’s continued existence on the planet, so one focus of this work is the Amazon rainforest – both Colombia’s slice of it and further afield.  Pred