Professor Paul Pearson, Cardiff University, UK
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Professor Paul Pearson, Cardiff University, UK
Professor Paul Pearson, Cardiff University, UK
" Professor Pearson graduated with a BA in Geology from Oxford in 1987 before completing a PhD at Cambridge in 1990 on the evolution of Eocene planktonic foraminifera. He then spent several years as a Research Fellow in Cambridge funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, following which, he was based at Bristol University as a Royal Society Research Fellow. He joined the School in January 2003.
Professor Pearson is interested in extracting climatic information from deep sea cores and sediments. He specializes in evolutionary and geochemical studies of planktonic foraminifera, and what they tell us about the long history of climate change on Earth. He has helped develop new proxies for determining past seawater pH and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and hence the history of the greenhouse effect. His studies range from the Cretaceous period to Recent.
Prof Pearson has sailed on several occasions with the Ocean Drilling Program. Over the last few years, he has been co-ordinating geological exploration and drilling programmes in coastal Tanzania and Java (Indonesia) where excellently preserved samples have been obtained, providing new insights into the history of tropical climate. "
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Professor Gavin Foster, University of Southampton, UK
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Professor Gavin Foster, University of Southampton, UK
Professor Gavin Foster, University of Southampton, UK
Gavin is a professor of isotope geochemistry at the University of Southampton. His research is primarily concerned with using novel isotopic techniques to gain insights into how and why the Earth’s climate has changed over geological time. Much of his recent research efforts are focused on using boron isotopes in the calcareous shells of foraminifera to reconstruct the state of the oceanic carbonate system in the geological past. In particular he is interested in the mechanisms responsible for the natural CO2 changes that accompanied the waxing and waning of the ice-sheets throughout the Pleistocene, and the role of CO2 in gradual, and sometimes rapid, climate change during the Cenozoic.
Dr Bärbel Hönisch, Columbia University, USA
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Dr Bärbel Hönisch, Columbia University, USA
Dr Bärbel Hönisch, Columbia University, USA
Bärbel Hönisch is an Assistant Professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York. She obtained a Diploma in Biology from the University of Bremen, and a PhD in Natural Sciences, studying at the Alfred-Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany.
Her research is focused on understanding the role of the ocean, and in particular the role of marine carbonate chemistry in global climate change. As she was originally trained as a (marine) biologist, her way of approaching paleoceanographic questions often includes a biological component. Culture experiments with living marine calcifiers are an important tool of her research to validate paleoceanographic proxies in foraminifers and corals, in particular the boron isotope proxy for seawater pH. She applies those findings to the reconstruction of seawater carbonate chemistry and atmospheric CO2 variations through Earth history. Current projects include the reconstruction of ocean acidification at the Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum, estimating the secular variation of boron isotopes in seawater and the validation of the B/Ca proxy in planktic foraminifers.
Dr Philip Sexton, The Open University, UK
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Dr Philip Sexton, The Open University, UK
Dr Philip Sexton, The Open University, UK
Philip Sexton is a palaeoceanographer and micropalaeontologist who works as an Associate Professor at The Open University. He received his PhD from the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, following which he was a European Commission Outgoing International Research Fellow at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and then a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow at Cardiff University. His research spans the disparate fields of the palaeoceanography of the very warm Palaeogene and the cold Pleistocene, but with a unifying emphasis on understanding links between the biosphere, carbon cycling and climatic variability in both end-member climate states. Recent research has focussed on exposing the dynamics of carbon cycling across rapid climatic warming events within the Eocene extreme ‘greenhouse’, where he has offered an alternative explanation for their genesis compared to prevailing views that invoked repeated releases of carbon from buried sedimentary reservoirs. He is also Academic Advisor for a new BBC 7-part TV series exploring the natural history of our oceans (‘Blue Planet 2’) to be televised in 2018.
Dr Aradhna Tripati, University of California, USA
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Dr Aradhna Tripati, University of California, USA
Dr Aradhna Tripati, University of California, USA
Aradhna Tripati is an assistant professor at UCLA in the Department of Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences and Earth & Space Sciences, and a Visiting Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. Her research is focused on the development and application of novel tools for studying climate change. She graduated with a PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2002. For the next eight years she was a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK, where she studied past warm periods in Earth’s history including the history of ice sheets in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and the history of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
Dr Mike Ellis, British Geological Survey, UK
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Dr Mike Ellis, British Geological Survey, UK
Dr Mike Ellis, British Geological Survey, UK
Dr Michael Ellis joined the BGS in 2008 as Head of the Climate Change programme. Dr Ellis oversees the development of a broad range of climate-change research, including palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironmental analyses of past episodes of rapid climate change. Research includes analyses of CO2 proxies via alkenones (in coccolithophorids), B/Ca ratios (in benthic forams), biome and biotope reconstruction, palaeoclimate GCM modelling, as well cognate investigations of soil-carbon dynamics and flux. Ellis was the founder and current Chair of the American Geophysical Union’s Earth and Planetary Surface Processes Focus Group, and he has served as an associate editor of Journal of Geophysical Research, Surface Earth, JGR Solid Earth, Basin Research, Geology,Biogeosciences, and he is currently on the Editorial Advisory Board of EOS.
Professor James (Jim) C. Zachos, University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), USA
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Professor James (Jim) C. Zachos, University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), USA
Professor James (Jim) C. Zachos, University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), USA
James (Jim) C Zachos is a Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC). He received his PhD in Oceanography from the University of Rhode Island in 1988, was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, and a fellow at the University of Cambridge. Zachos’s research primarily focuses on the dynamics of climate and ocean carbon cycle coupling over geologic time, particularly during periods of rapid and extreme change. He has authored/co-authored 115 peer-reviewed publications on topics ranging from Eocene global warming and ocean acidification to Oligocene ice-sheet evolution, and was a contributor to the 2007 IPCC report. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and the California Academy of Sciences, and is a recipient of the National Young Investigator, AGU Emiliani, and Humboldt Awards. He is also a member elect (2011) of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Maureen Raymo, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, USA
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Professor Maureen Raymo, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, USA
Professor Maureen Raymo, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, USA
Professor Maureen E Raymo is a paleoclimatologist and marine geologist who works at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University where she is also Director of the Lamont Deep Sea Sample Repository. She studies the history and causes of climate change in Earth's past. In 1988 she proposed the uplift‐weathering hypothesis that tied global cooling and the onset of polar glaciations in the late Cenozoic to a drawdown in atmospheric CO2 caused by the uplift of the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau. In addition to publishing fundamental work on the stratigraphy and chronology of the late Neogene, Raymo has also proposed hypotheses explaining why ice sheets appear to wax and wane primarily at the Earth’s obliquity frequency over much of the Plio-Pleistocene. In 2002, she was awarded the Robert L and Bettie P Cody Award in Ocean Sciences from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She is a fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dr Erin McClymont, Newcastle University, UK
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Dr Erin McClymont, Newcastle University, UK
Dr Erin McClymont, Newcastle University, UK
BSc (Hons) Geography, University of St Andrews, 2000; PhD “Surface ocean circulation and organic carbon export across the mid-Pleistocene climate transition”, University of Durham, 2004. Dr McClymont’s research focuses on the application and development of organic geochemistry (biomarker) proxies to a range of sedimentary archives, including marine sediments and peatlands. She is interested in applying these proxies to understand how key ocean/atmosphere connections have developed during the late Cenozoic, and to consider the biogeochemical feedbacks which may also have been important. She has tested the viability of the alkenone-based proxy for sea-surface temperatures (UK37’) in the face of extinction and evolution events in their source organisms (the Haptophyte algae). She has used novel alkenone distributions to reconstruct subpolar water mass distributions over the last 3 million years, exploited the differences between the UK37’ and TEX86 proxies to understand changes in upwelling intensity on centennial timescales, and identified evidence for changing greenhouse gas production from European peatlands over the last 3000 years. In seeking to understand the role played by atmospheric CO2 concentrations in some of the climate changes she has reconstructed, Dr McClymont has also been working with stable carbon isotope measurements of the alkenone biomarkers in order to develop a record of pCO2 which can be used to consider the controls and impacts of CO2 variability in the past.
Dr Helen Coxall, Cardiff University, UK
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Dr Helen Coxall, Cardiff University, UK
Dr Helen Coxall, Cardiff University, UK
Helen Coxall graduated with a BSc in Geology/Biology from Manchester University before completing a PhD at Bristol on the evolution of Eocene planktonic foraminifera and climate. She held Research Fellowships at the National Oceanographic Centre, UK (Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851) and the University of Rhode Island, before joining Cardiff University as a Royal Society University Research Fellow in 2005. She returned to Cardiff in 2010 after 18 months as a visiting lecturer at Stockholm University.
Helen is interested in ocean and climate systems of the early Cenozoic, when atmospheric CO2 is thought to have been 2-3 X preindustrial levels. She has a particular interest in pelagic ecosystems and the ‘service’ role they play in responding to or modulating climate through the carbon system. Her research involves generating marine geochemical climate proxy records (typically CaCO3 and CaCO3–based oxygen and carbon stable isotopes) using benthic and planktonic foraminifera to reconstruct changes in water column physical, chemical and biological properties. Her expertise in planktonic foraminifera taxonomy, isotopic palaeoecology, evolution and taphonomy provides optimal constraints on proxies of ocean thermal and nutrient stratification, which are critical for obtaining realistic estimates of surface ocean/atmospheric CO2.
Dr Appy Sluijs, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
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Dr Appy Sluijs, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Dr Appy Sluijs, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Appy Sluijs (1980) is an Assistant Professor at Biomarine Sciences, Institute of Environmental Biology, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Sluijs studied biology and biogeology in Utrecht and at the University of California at Santa Cruz, USA. Sluijs is a member of The Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the Outstanding Young Scientists Award of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in 2007. In 2010, he received the prestigious Vening Meinesz Prize for young geoscientists and the Heineken Young Scientists Award for Environmental Sciences. He is an editor of the open access journal Climate of the Past, published by the European Geosciences Union.
His research focuses on reconstructing temperature, hydrology, biogeochemical cycles and sea level during episodes in Earth’s history that were characterized by rapidly increasing, or generally high concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. He combines micropaleontological and geochemical techniques to understand system Earth under ‘greenhouse’ conditions. Funded through an ERC Starting Grant, he has recently started to quantify the physiological and biogeochemical response of dinoflagellates to changing seawater CO2 concentrations and pH. This response may be developed into a proxy to reconstruct ocean acidification in the geological past.
Dr Michael White, Nature, USA
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Dr Michael White, Nature, USA
Dr Michael White, Nature, USA
Michael White grew up in the Washington DC area and in Santa Fe, NM. He received his undergraduate degree in Environmental Science in 1992 from the University of Virginia, where he conducted research on leaf physiology and morphology with Hank Shugart. He studied remote sensing, carbon cycle modeling, and vegetation phenology with Steven Running at the University of Montana and obtained his MS in 1996 and Phd in 1999. Until 2008, Michael held a faculty position at Utah State University. He then accepted the position of climate science editor for Nature and moved to London for two years. In 2010, he transferred to Nature’s San Francisco office, where he now holds the position of Senior Editor.
Professor Rich Pancost, University of Bristol Cabot Institute, UK
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Professor Rich Pancost, University of Bristol Cabot Institute, UK
Professor Rich Pancost, University of Bristol Cabot Institute, UK
Rich Pancost joined the University of Bristol in 2000, became Professor in 2010 and became Director of the Cabot Institute, which engages interdisciplinary approaches to address major environmental challenges, in 2013. He conducts research on how organisms mediate our planet’s chemical environment and how their molecular signatures can be used to constrain climate change parameters. His research has ranged from the controls on arsenic contamination in aquifers to the stability of soil carbon when exposed to warmer temperatures. Three major themes have emerged from his past climate change research: 1) past events broadly confirm climate model forecasts and provide increased confidence in estimates of climate sensitivity; 2) current rates of environmental change are largely without precedent in geological history; and 3) biogeochemical processes respond in complex and unexpected ways to rapid global warming. Collectively, these observations reveal the deep uncertainty in predicting biotic responses to rapid global warming and the sustainability of ecosystems on which we depend.