Question: When you play with all the stuff you say you do, what signs tells you about climate change

Daniel Parsons answered on 7 Nov 2014:

hello,
when you look at a say the Grand Canyon you can see all the stripes and layers in the rocks. These stripes and layers record over 2 Billion years of earth’s history. The Colorado River has cut rapids into the canyon revealing these layers for us to see!
These layers and stripes are caused by a range of things, including how big the particles are within the rocks or the chemistry (colour) of the rocks and what they are made from. This information can tell us about past environments. For example, if the fragments of the rocks within a sedimentary rock are all the same sort of size and are well-rounded it can mean that they have travelled a long way, have been bashed about and have likely been carried by the wind….so the environment it was deposited in was like a desert.
In our laboratory basin we can investigate (play) with things such as water levels (sea-level) and vary the amount a sediment input into the basin and can recreate the stripy layers of sediments at a small scale. This lets us see what changes in environment control the thickness and style of layers and stripes in the deposits and thus link how something works to what environment it is produced by.