Colgate faculty members Paul Harnik, assistant professor of earth and environmental geosciences, Rebecca Metzler, professor of physics, and Damhnait McHugh, Raab Family Chair and professor of biology, have received a $100,000 award for their project “Determining the impacts of anthropogenic climate change on calcifying marine animals.”
The project will integrate paleontological, biophysical, and molecular approaches to examine the response of calcifying organisms, particularly mollusks, to anthropogenic climate change. Harnik, Metzler, McHugh, and their students will analyze present-day and historical samples of mollusks from the northern Gulf of Mexico, a region characterized by significant environmental changes across space and time. Ultimately, the goal is to achieve a better understanding of the response of marine communities to spatiotemporal changes due to climate change by assessing variations in mollusk communities, biomineralization patterns in their shells, and their population genetic structure across the Gulf of Mexico.