Research

Research Overview: My research combines field and laboratory measurements from the marine sedimentary record with numerical modeling to examine the nature of past changes in climate, the oceans, and their biogeochemistry. Towards that goal, I apply geochemical tools in seafloor sediments and their microfossils to reconstruct the environmental properties of ancient oceans. I use these records in conjunction with models of global biogeochemical cycles to test hypotheses about the climatic, biological, and tectonic mechanisms controlling biogeochemical cycles and their response to perturbation. Sedimentary material recovered over 50 years of deep-sea scientific drilling are my foremost material resource, and lend my research a Cenozoic focus. Specifically, my research investigates ancient events and intervals which present natural experiments for the response of the Earth system to perturbation or to conditions which differ from the modern preindustrial state. The response of biogeochemical cycles to such events in the past will inform the question of how such processes might respond to climatic, chemical and ecological changes in the future.