Things have been all go in the palaeolab with a new research assistant on board to help process the tiny forest I have been growing since July last year. In all I grew 125 silver birch under sun, cloud and shade mimicking light conditions to see what impact the qualities of that light had on growth at both the macro and micro-morphological scale. Over the last month we have been chopping them down, while measuring characteristics such as height, internode distance, ration of root to above ground weight. Every leaf is being photographed to capture 'green-ness' and for semi-automated measurement of leaf size. While the results aren't yet in, the below image captures what we are seeing pretty well - silver birch seedlings don't appreciate full sun, shade do ok, but they love the cloudy conditions so familiar to their home in Yorkshire! Hopefully my statistical analysis will bear out some differences we can track in the fossil record too, in our search for a proxy for cloud in deep-time.
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ProjectClouds cause the greatest uncertainty in climate models, but we currently have no way of testing cloud model performance in a climate with higher CO2 than the historical records. Palaeontology gives us access to such a past, but currently, we don't have a method to reconstruct cloud in deep time. Archives
June 2023
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