Today, we are going back many millennia to protect ourselves for the coming centuries: I spoke to two Colombian scientists, Carlos Jaramillo and Camila Martínez, who are studying the microscopic remnants of the distant past to predict the near future - full podcast here and article below.
Carlos and Camila are working on time travel - microscopic time travel.
Using clues from fossilised pollen and tree cells, the pair are reconstructing ancient ecosystems, so that we can see what our own ecosystems will look like in the near future.
“Pollen is like a fingerprint for a plant: it’s tiny, but if you find the pollen, you know the plant was living there – and because pollen is so resistant, it’s everywhere,” says Carlos.
Climate change is a constant feature of Planet Earth: at various points, the planet has been much cooler and much warmer than it is today.
If you study rock from a specific period, the pollen you find will tell you which plants were living there during that time: this means that if you find rock from a time which you know was (e.g.) hot, you can see which plants lived in that area amid high temperatures.
This tells you a huge amount about the ecosystem during that time. Fossilised tree cells - frozen in time - can even tell you how much water was in the ecosystem at that moment.
So, 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 things will look like in the conditions we ourselves will soon be living in.
This is precisely what Carlos and Camila are doing.
This week’s interview is also available on Spotify and Apple - and wherever else you get your podcasts!
To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
“Pollen and fossilised plants are the best tools to understand biodiversity, and how ecosystems have changed and evolved throughout time and history,” says Camila.
And while climate change is a permanent feature of life on this planet, the rate of CO2-release and warming which we are currently seeing is unprecedented:
“The climate change we are experiencing is happening way faster than previous climatic changes, so we are confronting a scenario which has no perfect analogue in the past – but we can still learn a lot,” said Camila.
Pollen. Photo courtesy of Carlos Jaramillo
The Amazon Rainforest takes centre stage in current work, both in Colombia and further afield: it’s a crucial ecosystem for human life across the world.
“No matter where you are on the planet, your drinking water at some point came from the Amazon,” says Carlos.
But current predictive models are in conflict about what will happen to the Amazon as the earth warms, he tells me.
“The United Nations releases global water circulation prediction models – half of those models predict it will become a grassland, the other half predict that rainfall will double.”
“One path is to wait a hundred years and just see what happens – that seems like a bad choice… The other path is to go back in time to those periods when the warming was similar to what we’re seeing now,” says Carlos.
To reach fossils from the relevant time periods, Carlos and his team have drilled rock cores deep into the ground at two sites in the Amazon:
“We’ve drilled in the middle of the rainforest, extracting rock cores – a piece of rock which takes us back in time – we’ve done two now – a tube of rock about 100m thick and 15cm in diameter,” he told me.
An Amazonian rock core, as drilled by Carlos and his team. Photo courtesy of Carlos Jaramillo.
“They go back 12 million years - so we have a record of what has happened in Amazonia for those 12 million years.”
Camila, meanwhile, has specialised in fossilised tree trunks and works all over Colombia and its neighbouring countries, studying their cells.
What both of these areas of study have in common are the limitations of the human mind: the sheer processing power and knowledge required to extract, identify, and categorise particles is vast - particularly when you work in tropical areas.
“Biodiversity is fantastic – that’s what the tropics are all about – but it’s also a curse – there are too many different species,” says Carlos.
“You can be a palynologist in Norway and learn all the pollen grains in a week, but in Colombia you could spend your entire life learning and only learn a tiny proportion,” he tells me.
“You can learn much more about diversity and the past with AI – we have big limitations on our human brain, even with databases and statistical analysis – it’s not enough,” Camila agrees.
This is the new frontier: Carlos is working on ways to harness AI, creating image databases and training machines to recognise fossilised pollen grains - the potential for accelerated progress is huge, he tells me.
Both Camila and Carlos are driving towards prediction algorithms which will be able to receive data and predict the future of specific ecosystems based on the climatic changes being experienced: these may be vital tools for humanity’s uncertain future.
So today, we travel from the fingerprints of a distant past, through to the futuristic methods made possible by machine learning. Carlos and Camila span multiple disciplines and vast timeframes - all in the hopes of getting us the information we need to survive the climate crisis which will change the face of the planet within our lifetimes.
In this podcast, they tell me how they’re doing it - and why it is so important, not just for Colombia or the Amazon - but for all of us, wherever we are.
1×
0:00
-49:27
If you enjoyed this interview, check out this podcast I recorded with Carlos and Camila last year, along with science communications expert Luz Elena Oviedo, all about Colombia’s pre-historic fauna, and the effort to bring palaeontology to the far reaches of Colombia.
This week, I’m taking you (way) back in time, to a very different Colombia - one well before the arrival of human beings… But in the process of looking back, we’ll also be looking forwards to what th…
And if you want to hear more from Colombia’s top scientists, here are a few other podcasts from the archive - from the underground, to the invisible, to outer space itself…
Carlos Jaramillo, born in Bogota, is a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. His research investigates the causes, patterns, and processes of tropical biodiversity at diverse temporal and spatial scales, as well as the evolution of tropical landscapes over geological time.
Camila Martínez is a Professor in the School of Applied Sciences and Engineering at Medellín’s EAFIT Universidad, and Research Associate from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama. Her research interests are focused on the evolutionary ecology of tropical plants, using past reconstructions of tropical biomes and climates, using the fossil record of plants together with the study of modern plants and the interactions with the environment.
Share this post