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Welcome to Södra Sandvik

Meet Alasdair Skelton, Professor at Stockholm University and Todd Ehlers, Professor at Tübingen University and learn about the climate of the past.
Map of Utö showing walking route from Gruvbryggan to Södra Sandvik
© Susanne Hjerp
From Gruvbryggen (“the miner’s pier”), we have walked 2 km through the forest to Södra Sandvik (“southern sandy bay”). Here we will meet Alasdair Skelton, Professor at Stockholm University and Todd Ehlers, Professor at Tübingen University. Our goal is to learn more about the climate of the past.

With Alasdair Skelton, we will learn about Earth’s climate from a perspective of billions of years. More specifically, we will focus on:

  • The Archean Eon
  • How Sweden emerged from the sea in the early Proterozoic Eon
  • The Great Oxygenation Event
  • Snowball Earth
  • Hyperthermals
  • The greenhouse effect and the albedo effect
  • How weathering of rocks stabilizes Earth’s climate
  • Possible reasons for Cenozoic cooling

With Todd Ehlers, we will learn about Earth’s climate from a perspective of 800 thousand years. More specifically, we will focus on:

  • An 800 000-year record of Earth’s atmospheric CO2 concentration
  • How to interpret past climate change
  • How to plot climate data
  • How to interpret these data

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