Mar. 12, 2001 Blacksburg, Va., March 12, 2001 -- The earth is
like a birthday cake -- layered and containing prizes. Virginia
Tech researchers are looking at the rock record from the last
600 million years to study the past history of climate change
and to determine where oil and gas may be hidden. J. Fred Read,
professor of geological sciences, and Ph.D. student Thomas C.
Wynn of Mebane, North Carolina, will present their research at
the 36th annual meeting of the Northeastern Section of the
Geological Society of America (GSA) in Burlington, Vermont,
March 12-14. Read is looking at the signatures of the ice house
and the greenhouse worlds in the stratigraphic record since the
Cambrian period. "The earth has gone through three major glacial
stages in 600 million years -- about 300 million years apart,"
he says. The most recent ice age started some 35 million years
ago and peaked in the last 700,000 years (the later part of the
Pleistocene). "We are actually in a little greenhouse phase of
an ice house world n