After growing up near the water in Germany, Claudia Schröder-Adams says she has always loved marine environments.
“I’m a person who loves to be close to nature. It was, for me, kind of important that I study natural sciences,” says Schröder-Adams, an earth sciences professor at Carleton. “I love ocean environments, and I think it is such a vast, unknown area still where it is still a bit of a frontier still to study.”
Schröder-Adams says she combines her love of science with her love of aquatic life in her work as a micropaleontologist, a scientist who studies very small, very dead organisms.
But for some students at Carleton, she’s the professor who teaches a class on dinosaurs and takes students on study trips around the world, including instructing students on the Carleton expedition to Antarctica in February 2011.
As a researcher, Schröder-Adams says she tries to understand how the planet has changed over millions of years and how the past may inform the environment’s future.
“We all know and we’re all afraid [that] the climate is warming, so to look at a plummet [in temperature] that we may be heading to, you can study the Cretaceous because that was a time when the planet was particularly warm and we actually had a greenhouse climate,” she says.
Recently, Schröder-Adams says she’s been researching sedimentary basins in the Arctic, looking for clues about life in the Cretaceous period by using the fossils of tiny organisms to reconstruct the environment.
“By reconstructing that, you understand better the whole system of climate change, how an ecosystem reacts to it, and all the different components,” she says.
In the classroom, Schröder-Adams teaches a course on dinosaurs.
The popularity of the extinct creatures was one of the reasons for the creation of the class, she says.
“I wanted to create a course . . . to really get the students thinking, what is earth sciences? What is the whole notion of a changing Earth, not only for the last hundred years, but over millions of years?” she says. “I started off with about a hundred students, and over the years, it’s almost grown to 500 students.”
The course isn’t easy, and it can’t cover everything there is to know about every dinosaur, Schröder-Adams says.
But it does cover some geology to teach students about the environment associated with dinosaurs, she says. Students then learn about fossils and how to find them.
There are lessons on the dinosaurs themselves, she says. She teaches students about dinosaurs’ behaviour, bones and extinction. Students also study the creatures living in the air and in the water at the time of the dinosaurs.
“Eventually, we get to the feathered dinosaurs,” she says. “They are super cool because they are discovered much more recently and they have these feathery coats. And that, of course, leads to the evolutionary connection between birds, who are still with us, and dinosaurs.”
The class is also going on a field trip to look at fossils, she says.
Schröder-Adams says she enjoys the opportunity to spread knowledge outside of the classroom by taking students on educational trips to do field work in such places as Nova Scotia, the British Columbia coast and Germany.
“It is always more rewarding than in the classroom,” she says. “Because you’re so much closer to nature, you can demonstrate what is out there and create that enthusiasm for young people when you are sharing those outdoor experiences than when you basically project it as a flat image.”
Schröder-Adams says she can’t pick just one favourite place among all the areas she’s visited for her research.
“The Arctic is spectacular,” she says. “It is vast. There’s no tree cover, so when you look at the Arctic landscapes, it is so overwhelming, it’s really quite spiritual to go there because you recognize that nature and nature’s forces are so much bigger than yourself.”
The expanse of unpopulated land in Australia is another favourite place, she says.
“Coming from a very crowded country, that’s what I’m attracted to,” Schröder-Adams says.
A trip to Australia may be next for some of her students. Schröder-Adams says she’s planning a trip to the Great Barrier Reef and hopes to bring another group of students to the Antarctic in 2013.
The travelling she’s done as a micropaleontologist has satisfied the dreams she had when she chose the field, she says.
“I look back and I always can say that I did the right choice,” she says.
