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Friday's Findings is a public webinar series hosted by the USGS Ecosystems Mission Area to provide audiences the opportunity to discover the Ecosystems science capacity within the USGS. These half hour webinars provide listeners an overview of science topics and offer a chance for the audience to ask questions about our science. On Friday, July 14^th, Madelyn Mette of the USGS St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center will highlight how clam shells are used to reconstruct climate history by USGS researchers and collaborators, and will discuss future directions in producing multi-century records of marine climate from key locations, including along the southeastern U.S. coastline.

Along the U.S. eastern seaboard and coastlines across the North Atlantic Ocean, quahog clams are a key cultural and economic resource. While clam population and habitat restoration are a focus of much research in USGS coastal ecosystem science, clamshells provide a surprising opportunity for another important type of geologic research - the study of paleoclimate. Shells contain annual banding, just like tree rings, allowing us to look many centuries into the past to understand changing environmental conditions year-by-year. This type of information is valuable to climate scientists who seek to understand large-scale climate variability and predict future environmental change.