Most of what I'm going to present today actually will not be results. I have some preliminary results to show you but most of the discussion will be about the methods that we use for this type of reconstruction and to address these questions. There really is not much of a precedent for the type of work that we've been doing and we've had to draw upon a number of different scientific disciplines to put the project together. We've essentially spent the last four years assembling the methods that will allow us to do this. We think we have a good suite of methods now and I'd like to go through them in detail, because I think they're really exciting. We hope that they will be adopted by the broader paleontological scientific community to address similar questions, even though we're dealing with a somewhat unique situation here in the Gulf and with the Colorado River.

In the course of explaining these methods, I'm going to touch quite a bit upon a little bit of physics, a bit of chemistry, and a lot of geology and biology and hopefully, I'll be able to sort of pull it all together to explain how we're doing this paleoecological reconstruction. The key to our ability to do this relies on stable isotopes. Now, an isotope is a variation of a physical or chemical element that has a slightly different atomic mass or atomic number. Many of you are familiar with so-called radioactive isotopes, common examples being things like Uranium-235 and Carbon-14 where this species or form of the element will emit the radioactive particle or atomic particle to move from this unstable state to a more stable energy state.

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