ROYAL SOCIETY OF SOUTH AFRICA - Lecture Series 2015

 

Dr Peter Frenzel will present a lecture entitled:

 

"Marginal marine Ostracoda and Foraminifera as proxies

for environmental change"

 

Wednesday, 8 July 2015

Time: 5.45 pm

Venue: John Bews Lecture Theatre,

Life Sciences Campus, Carbis Road, Pietermaritzburg.

 

 

Ostracods (seed shrimps) and foraminifers (testate amoebians) are amongst the most versatile tools of micropalaeontology. Both groups possess easily fossilisable hard parts and are of minute size comparable to sand grains. They can be sampled from most types of water bodies, often in large numbers. Because these bioindicators reflect the ambient conditions by species composition, abundance, morphological variability, population structure and geochemical signals preserved in their shells, ostracods and foraminifers are widely used for answering questions in palaeoclimatology, environmental micropalaeontology, geoarchaeology, coastal geology, geohazard research and other fields of investigation along coastlines worldwide. This talk presents concepts, methods and case studies from the research of the author covering South Africa, the Mediterranean, Northern Europe and Southeast Asia.

 

Peter Frenzel was born in Berlin in 1965 and studied geology and palaeontology in Greifswald at the German Baltic Sea coast. There, he also obtained his PhD degree for a micropalaeontological study on Upper Cretaceous Foraminifera. After research stays in Angers (France), Newcastle (UK) and Rostock (Germany) covering mainly Quaternary microfaunas, he is now working as a researcher and lecturer of palaeontology and geology at Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany. His experience investigating Quaternary brackish water microfossils spans almost 30 years and focuses on ecology and taxonomy of Ostracoda and Foraminifera and their application to geoscientific research questions. Currently, he is involved in RAIN, a German-South African research project on Holocene climate and coastal evolution comparing sediment cores from coastal lakes within the Summer, Winter and All-Year-Round rain zones of South Africa. Cooperation partners are UKZN and UCT in South Africa as well as MARUM of Bremen in Germany.

 

 

All welcome, please support!  Light refreshments will be supplied.

 

Enquiries: Prof. Mike Perrin, Tel. 033 – 260 5118 / 5435.