1. Light from Quasar Absorption from Thousands of Gas Clouds in front of Quasar! decreasing redshift = closer to us Quasar Absorption Lines

2. Quasar Absorption Lines and low-Metallicity DLAs Collaborators: Caltech/UCSC Quasar Absorption Line group including Wallace Sargent (CIT), Jason X. Prochaska (UCSC), Michael Rauch (OCIW) Pomona College Students: Irene Toro Martinez (’10), Daniel Jay Beeler (’10), Catherine Wilka (’12)

3. Illustration of Damped Lyman Alpha Geometry and Spectrum

4. The amazing DLA fly- through movie! (from Andrew Pontzen, IFA, Cambridge)

5. Analogies - Ice Cores + Tree Rings ice cores - can measure climate history of Earth to 800,000 years tree rings - can measure climate back to 10,000 years ago

6. Light from Quasar Absorption from Thousands of Gas Clouds in front of Quasar! decreasing redshift = closer to us Quasar Absorption Lines - can measure “climate” of universe for the past 10-12 billion years!