Alejandra Rodríguez on Laguna La Calderona in Boyacá, Colombia in 2011
Daniela Rojas Sánchez
Colombian limnologist Alejandra Rodríguez-Abaunza looks at fossils of tiny crustaceans in an arid lake in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula to gain a better understanding of climate change over time and how to better manage water resources in the region.
Rodríguez-Abaunza, who is currently a master’s student in Marine Sciences and Limnology at UNAM, Mexico, says by studying fossil pigments, stable isotopes in ostracod shells and organic matter from lake sediments from the Maya lowlands there, scientists can work out what a drier, hotter Yucatan might look like.
“Climate models predict that the temperature will increase between 4 – 5°C and the rainfall will decrease in the future in the Yucatan Peninsula,” she said, “In this scenario, aquatic diversity and the availability of water resources and human activities in the region would be threatened.”
“Yucatan Peninsula has had a long history of human occupation, providing an opportunity to track long-term evolution of the lakes,” she said, adding that scientists are able to contrast natural variability with human cultural development in the Maya lowlands over thousands of years.
“The older Yucatan ostracod shells of our research are 8,000 years old,” she said, “The species I study still live in lakes and sinkholes of the region.”
“We hope that these data will allow a better understanding of the climate and how to manage water resources in the region,” she said, adding that the project was the result of a collaborative network involving many specialists including those from Queen’s University in Canada, the University of Florida in the US, UNAM in Mexico and Universidad del Norte in Colombia.
Finding Fossils
Rodríguez-Abaunza grew up in Moniquirá, a small Colombian town in a part of the Andes mountain range that was once a shallow sea and today is rich in fossils, especially Ammonoids.
“In my town there are many rivers and streams where I went fishing and looking for fossils when I was a little girl,” she said, adding that she went on to receive a full scholarship to study biology at UPTC, the public university of her home department (state).
“When I started my degree, I wanted to be an ornithologist, but when I watched a drop of water under the microscope for the first time, I got fascinated with the microscopic world,” she said, “For this reason, I joined a Limnology research group in my third semester, sampling aquatic microorganisms of 15 lakes of the Andean Paramo (alpine tundra).
In her last semester Rodríguez-Abaunza went on a paleontology expedition to hunt fossil crustaceans.
“That moment reminded me the passion I had to the fossils when I was a child and I learned that it was also possible to find fossil microcrustaceans in the lakes’ sediments that inhabited water bodies,” she said.
Her passion for these fossils has now taken her to Argentina, Panama, Spain, back to Colombia and now to Mexico.
Women in STEM
During this journey, Rodríguez-Abaunza said she had the opportunity to collaborate with some amazing women in STEM.
She said Synergy LATINA was a collaborative project of young palaeo-scientists, which held a workshop in Mar de Plata, Argentina on August 2014.
“Our working team was made up of five women from Spain, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Colombia,” she said, “We designed a palaeoecological multi-disciplinary research project during this workshop.”
During the following years the researchers exchanged hypotheses and ideas, which became a scientific article and findings from this research were presented in the Journal of South American Earth Sciences on January 2021.
Alejandra Rodríguez examining fossils at the Centro de Investigaciones Paleontológicas in Villa de … [+]
Juan Parra
Another Colombian geoscientist is Miriam Rios-Sanchez, who studies hydrogeology, the study where and how groundwater moves through the Earth’s crust.
“Few countries in Latin America have detailed studies of their groundwater resources,” Rios-Sanchez said, “I work teaching people how to find, study, manage and protect groundwater resources.”
