I am a geochemist who studies Earth’s past climate using marine and lake sediment cores and speleothems.
Research Area
I am interested in how past climate change affected ancient civilisations, including the Maya of Mesoamerica, Harrapan of the Indus Valley and Khmer of Cambodia. An active project involves speleothems and cave monitoring in Yucatan, Mexico. I also study the relationship between changes in Earth’s orbit and the waxing and waning of the great Northern Hemisphere ice sheets during the Quaternary (i.e., the Milankovitch theory of the ice ages). I recently (Oct.-Dec. 2022) led International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 397 to the Iberian Margin off Portugal, which is well known area for its rapidly accumulating sediment that preserves a high-fidelity record of past climate change. We recovered 6.2 km of high-quality core that is well suited for studying orbital and millennial climate change since the late Miocene. This material will constitute a major focus of my research efforts in the coming years. I am also interested in analytical method development for palaeoclimatic proxies, especially stable isotopes of hydration water and carbonates. I have links with industrial partners Nu Instruments (Wrexham, UK) and Aerodyne (Boston, USA) who are manufacturers of mass spectrometers and tunable infrared laser direct absorption spectrometers (TILDAS), respectively.
Project Interests
I would be keen to develop projects centred around ancient human-climate-environment interactions using lake sediment cores and/or speleothems. I also welcome projects to study glacial-interglacial cycles of the Quaternary, including the interactions between millennial and orbital climate change and their underlying causes and evolving contextuality. Any projects involving integration of marine, terrestrial and ice core data using the newly recovered cores from IODP Expedition 397 is encouraged. I also have several ongoing projects involving paleoclimate proxy development, including new ways of measuring oxygen isotopes in carbonates by TILDAS and combining XRF (Zr/Rb) and sediment grain size analysis (sortable silt) to infer past variations in bottom current strength.
