Hello. My name is Broxton Bird, and I am an associate professor in the Department of Earth Sciences here at IUPY. I'm a paleo climatologist, which means that I am a geologist that reconstructs Earth's climate through time. Climate change poses perhaps the greatest existential threat to human society and environments across the planet today. In order to tackle the threats posed by climate change, it's necessary to understand how the climate system functions naturally, and if and how humans have altered these natural climate functions, as well as their impact on the landscape. In the Midwest, my research is focused on human landscape, climate interactions. The instrumental record of climate change and landscape interactions only extends for perhaps the last hundred years. And as such, my work relies on natural archives to provide information about past climates, including flooding. To reconstruct climate, I mainly use what are called kettle lakes, which are simply lakes that were formed at the end of our last ice age as the continental ice sheets retreated. These left behind blocks of ice on the landscape that eventually melted, leave behind depressions that became lakes. To reconstruct flooding, I use lakes that are currently located in floodplains of major rivers, such as the White River, Ohio River, and other major rivers in the mid Continent. These rivers are infilled with sediments during floods, and by dating the sediments, we can determine the rapidness or how quickly sediments infill these lakes at different times with more quick sedimentation being more frequent flooding, and when these lakes are infilling with sediment more slowly, and we have less flooding over time. By combining these two types of lake sediment records together, we can understand the relationships between climate and flooding. We can also combine the archaeological record with these types of data in order to understand pre Colombian or pre colonial climate flood human relationships, and then also compare those with the climate relationships that are happening today. Because these records begin at the present day and extend far back into time before major colonial landscape modifications, we can see how natural climate flood relationships existed prior to landscape modifications and how we may have influenced climate flood relationships by our modern land use practices. We can also determine the rates at which rivers migrate across the watershed and cross the landscape so that we can understand the relationship between climate and stream mobility, which has major implications for erosion, especially threats to our infrastructure, communities, and agricultural lands. So with this information, we can predict how flooding and river mobility will respond to projected climate changes and help communities prepare for the future.