Lam, a paleontologist and paleoceanographer, is an assistant professor in Harpur College’s Earth Sciences Department, but she was raised in a rural town in Hanover County, Va. Its location deep in the state’s backwoods aided Lam in her first scientific explorations: She collected rocks and animal skulls and learned how to distinguish between mineral types.

Now she studies a group of marine plankton called planktic foraminifera that live in the surface ocean. Foraminifera secrete a calcium carbonate shell, and when they die those shells collect in layers on the sea floor over millions of years. Lam’s goal is to date the sediments using the first and last occurrences of certain species of foraminifera preserved in the fossil record. This process is known as biostratigraphy.

Using the fossil plankton shells, researchers can reconstruct oceanic conditions across ancient warm periods to predict how Earth’s systems will react to climate change. For example, by looking at the Mid-Piacenzian Warm Period, which took place about 3.3 million years ago, researchers found that there was almost as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere then as there is now.

“With the chemistry of their [foraminifera] tests, we can actually infer things about climate change such as water temperatures, salinity changes, ice volume changes and also productivity changes in the water column through time,” Lam says.

Biostratigraphers normally rely on a particular scheme to tell the age of the rocks, but Lam realized that it was not universally applicable.

Plankton are migratory by nature and move to other areas over large spans of time. Therefore, her lab has been focused on creating more- nuanced schemes for telling time with the fossil plankton in different areas of the ocean.

Lam has zoomed in on the foraminifera of the southwestern Pacific Ocean’s mid-latitude region. She’s using the geochemistry of the plankton to reconstruct surface water temperature, salinity values and more.

The work is an extension of postdoctoral research Lam began at Binghamton as well as a continuation of her dissertation project. She earned her doctorate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in geosciences; that’s also where she was when she went on her first ocean expedition. After an extensive application process to board the ship, selected researchers work 12 hours a day while at sea for two months straight.

To Lam, it isn’t a bad trade. Scientists put in long days at sea, but daily tasks such as cooking, cleaning and laundry were taken care of by the crew. Many of Lam’s experiments are sourced from underwater sediment cores that she and her research team obtained during this trip.

“One of the most vivid memories from sailing in the Tasman Sea is going out onto the deck at night and looking up at the sky,” Lam recalls. “I’ve never seen the sky so clear. There’s no light pollution, and you can see the Milky Way stretching across the entire sky. It is breathtaking.”

For her dissertation research, Lam reconstructed the Kuroshio Current Extension, a western boundary current that supplies warmth to waters near Japan, and helps support a wide diversity of marine life. She wanted to observe the behavior of foraminifera as the Kuroshio’s warm waters met with the Arctic’s cold currents, creating a transitory area of warm and cool water species called an ecotone. More specifically, she wanted to quantify how many species were able to sustain life in the now-temperate waters.

“One of the papers we published found that actually, for the last at least 12 million years, there’s very high diversity within the Kuroshio Current Extension throughout this time period,” Lam says. “And we think that means two things: One, that this current has sustained planktic foraminifera for a really long time in that region. Two, that the Kuroshio Current Extension’s ecotone has been a prevalent feature in the Northwest Pacific for a very long time.”

Lam was interested to learn that foraminifera showed a greater diversity at 37° north latitude, which is much higher than the field’s previously predicted latitude at which foraminiferal diversity peaks.

“This is called the latitudinal diversity gradient, and a lot of biological studies say that the tropics hold the highest diversity of organisms — that’s not true for all species,” Lam says. “So our study found that the latitudinal diversity gradient for foraminifera may actually be a little different. … We were showing higher diversity at higher latitudes.”

Although Lam loves research, the coolest part of her job has been teaching students all about her passion: geology. Lam has a special message she likes to leave with all of her students throughout their time together.

“My first comment is: You belong, everyone belongs,” says Lam, who was a first-generation college student. “Academia may not have been made for everyone at first, but it surely is today. The second piece of advice I have is to find mentors — not just advisors; find mentors. These are people who are going to help you along in your career. It’s just finding people you can rely on, that you can vent to. That will give you good advice and support you, no matter what.”

“It was like discovering the botanical equivalent of dinosaur footprints,” said William Stein, associate professor of biological sciences at Binghamton, and one of the article’s authors. “But the most exciting part was finding out just how many different types of footprints there were. The newly uncovered area was preserved in such a way that we were literally able to walk among the trees, noting what kind they were, where they had stood and how big they had grown.”

The town of Gilboa in upstate New York is famous for being the location of some of the earliest tree fossils. But after a new round of excavation, scientists may gain new insight into the role of modern-day forests and their impact on climate change.

The Gilboa area has been a known tree fossil location since the late 1800s but during the 1920s, when construction of the Schoharie Dam revealed a dense stand of trees, paleontologists began to investigate the site in earnest. Named Eospermatopteris, or “ancient seed fern,” by Winifred Goldring of the New York State Museum in 1924, these earliest trees had survived only as broken standing bases and trunks, all around 1 to 3 feet high. But more detailed glimpses of the past emerged in 2004 and 2005 when Linda VanAller Hernick, paleontology collection manager, and Frank Mannolini, paleontology collection technician from the State Museum, uncovered more intact specimens, complete with crowns.

After investigation by Stein and Christopher M. Berry, a paleobotany lecturer at Cardiff University in Wales, the team determined that these trees resembled modern-day cycads or tree ferns but were not related to either one. Working in conjunction with Stein, Mannolini also developed a sketch of the ancient forest.

The research team got a huge break in spring 2010 when repairs of the Gilboa Dam reopened the site for another look. What they found this time was a large, substantially intact portion of the ancient forest horizon, complete with root systems. As they had expected, Eospermatopteris root systems of different sizes were the most abundant.  But what they didn’t expect to find was the level of detail of the overall composition of the forest.

The first glimpse of the unexpected complexity of this ancient forest came when Stein, Hernick and Mannolini found the remains of large scrambling tree-sized plants, identified as aneurophytaleans. These plants were likely close ecological associates to the original trees, living among them on the forest floor like modern ferns, possibly scrambling into the forest canopy much as tropical vines do today.  The aneurophytes are the first in the fossil record to show true “wood” and the oldest known group in the lineage that lead to modern seed plants.

The team also came across a tree belonging to the class Lycopsida, or club mosses, which predates an earlier discovery made in Naples, N.Y., and an ecologically important group in the history of land plants. The lycopsids are an ancient group of non-seed plants represented today by low growing forms such as the “running pines” of the northern hardwood forests of New York. They also inhabited swamps and ended up being much of the Pennsylvanian coal we burn today.

So what exactly did this complex ancient forest in Gilboa look like? Stein and the team figure that the area probably enjoyed a wetland environment in a tropical climate. It was filled with large Eospermatopteris trees that resembled weedy, hollow, bamboo-like plants, with roots spreading out in all directions, allowing other plants to gain a foothold. Scrambling among these roots on the forest floor were aneurophytaleans, acting much like ferns do today, and possibly climbing into the forest canopy as vines. The lycopsids, although seemingly rare, may also have been very important in certain places although perhaps not yet as specialized inhabitants of swamps.

But what the research team believe is most important about this particular site is what it was doing to impact the rest of the planet. At the time the Gilboa forest began to emerge — around the Middle Devonian period, about 386 million years ago — Earth experienced a dramatic drop in global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and the associated cooling led ultimately to a period of glaciation.

“Trees probably changed everything,” Stein said. “Not only did these emerging forests likely cause important changes in global patterns of sedimentation, but they may have triggered a major extinction in fossil records.”

For Stein, it all comes down to one thing: how much we don’t know but need to understand about our ancient past.

“The complexity of the Gilboa site can teach us a lot about the original assembly of our modern day ecosystems,” he said. “As we continue to understand the role of forests in modern global systems, and face potential climate change and deforestation on a global scale, these clues from the past may offer valuable lessons for managing our planet’s future.”