Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Academic
Description
In this talk I will go from the nanoscale extreme to the planet by examine how the chemistry of an aqueous environment influences the formation of natural, inorganic crystals, termed minerals, and how biology can manipulate the chemistry of a system to create fascinating architectures than lock in signatures of the history of our planet enable us to make predictions of our future climate. I will discuss the consequence of changing the chemical environment on the material characteristics of biomineralized materials that we can analyse using standard chemical techniques such as vibrational spectroscopy. Similarly, I will discuss some exciting new results about how the change from a biomineralized material into a geological one can reset the signatures that we use to understand climatic changes in the past that inform our expectations of the future.