Geography Colloquium: "Stories from the Mud: The Last Three Millennia of Drought and Fire from Colombia and South Africa"

Please join the Department of Geography for the colloquium series talk: "Stories from the Mud: The last three millennia of drought and fire from Colombia and South Africa" by Mitchell J. Power, curator of the Garrett Herbarium and professor in the School of Environment, Society and Sustainability, at University of Utah.

Lake sediment records provide remarkable archives of past environmental change, preserving high-resolution records of wildfire activity, vegetation dynamics, and climate variability that extend far beyond the instrumental record. Drawing on over a decade of paleoecological fieldwork in Colombia and South Africa, Professor Mitchell Power explores how sediment cores reveal changes in fire regimes and ecosystem responses to drought, shifts in precipitation, and human land-use over the past several millennia. By interrogating multiple records across space and time this research reconstructs the timing, magnitude, and frequency of past fires while examining the climatic and ecological conditions that shaped landscape burning on two continents. 

Exploring sedimentary archives from the Colombian Andes and Cape Province provides insight into how regional climate variability, vegetation composition, fuel availability, and human activities interact to influence fire regimes. Particular attention is given to the role of extreme drought and large-scale climate patterns, including impacts from El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) and changes to the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) in shaping periods of elevated fire activity and ecosystem change. By integrating high-resolution fire histories with independent paleoclimate reconstructions and modern ecological observations, this research establishes long-term baselines for understanding natural fire variability, identifying the influence of human activity, and assessing ecosystem resilience.