Ana Lopes, Emilia Salgueiro and Antje Voelker participated in the conference “FORAMS 2018: Foraminifera in a Changing World” where they presented their work related to foraminifers.
Foraminifers are mainly marine microorganisms with calcium carbonate shells. The different species are distributed geographically depending on their ecological preferences for sea water temperature, salinity, nutrient content, depth, etc. They make their shells taking ions from the water and therefore analyzing the geochemistry of their shells we can obtain information about the water in which they lived and reconstruct the climate and oceanography of the past.
(Pictures of foraminifers taken with an scanning electron microscope, copyright of Montserrat Alonso Garcia)