Past climate and carbon cycle change; using proxy data and numerical methods to understand the Earth System.
Research Area
My research looks at the Earth’s climate system (https://pastclimate.esc.cam.ac.uk), including in particular the impacts of ocean circulation on hydrological- and biogeochemical cycling. My work aims to provide a geological perspective on the climate system and its dynamics on relatively short time scales (10-104 yrs): time-scales that are relevant to past and future human activities. I use a range of geochemical, sedimentological and micropalaeontological methods to infer past environmental change (e.g. trace elements, stable and radiogenic isotopes), and I work closely with numerical modelers to place such observations within a coherent interpretative framework. Active research areas include: 1) the causes and consequences of abrupt change during the late Pleistocene (i.e. ‘Dansgaard-Oeschger’ and ‘Heinrich’ events); 2) the deep ocean’s temperature, oxygenation and carbonate ion response to climate change, and its link to atmospheric CO2; 3) laser-ablation analysis techniques to understand rare earth element and redox sensitive element cycling; 4) the role of the ocean in glacial-interglacial CO2 change and the evolution of the marine radiocarbon inventory across the last deglaciation; 5) the hydraulics of the last Lake Agassiz ‘super-flood’; and 6) speleothem records of terrestrial climate change in Southern Europe (including links to local archaeological stratigraphy).
Project Interests
I am especially keen to support PhD projects in four key areas:
- Radiocarbon as a carbon cycle tracer to infer the ocean’s role in rapid CO2 change (in collaboration with modelers and ice-core scientists at BAS and in France).
- The seasonality of past abrupt climate change using high-resolution marine records from the Iberian Margin, combined with numerical modelling.
- Novel numerical methods (e.g. machine learning) to infer marine geochemical inventories from sparse observations.
- Speleothem records of past hydroclimate change in central Italy and the Italian Alps (with opportunities for fieldwork, and collaboration with archaeologists).
