Spotlight

Clara Blättler

Understanding the composition of the oceans during the Last Glacial Maximum (approximately 20,000 years ago) has been a long-standing problem in paleoceanography. Assistant Professor Clara Blättler published a study showing that interstitial waters extracted from the carbonate-rich sediments of the Maldives preserve features from this ancient ocean. In collaboration with scientists at Princeton University and the University of Miami, she showed that these newly discovered waters had elevated salinity and heavy isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen, despite ongoing reactions with their host sediments. Read about their work here.