Hyperthermals – rapid and extreme global warming in our geological past

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. 

I am currently a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at University of California Santa Cruz. My research focuses on reconstructing ocean biogeochemistry and climate during carbon perturbations in warm intervals across the Cenozoic. I specialize on the development of geochemical proxies in modern ocean sediments and application of these proxies to reconstruct past environmental conditions. I worked to establish the fidelity of boron based proxies as indicators of the oceanic carbon cycle. My research at UCSC is aimed at capturing the global signature of ocean acidification during the rapid warming event that occurred ~56 million years ago known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. My overall motivation to investigate Earth’s history is foremost to understand the past and second to employ this knowledge to improve forecasting of future climate.

Hugh Jenkyns has 45 years’ research experience primarily focused on the palaeoceanography and palaeoclimatology of Jurassic and Cretaceous marine and continental sediments. His fields of interest range across geochemistry, particularly in the use of traditional and non-traditional isotopes, sedimentology and stratigraphy.  He co-wrote the first paper on the causes and consequences of ‘oceanic anoxic events’ in 1976, and has championed the application of chemostratigraphy to the understanding of Mesozoic environmental change. He published the first palaeotemperature data from the Cretaceous of the Arctic Ocean.  He has considerable experience of Deep Sea Drilling (DSDP, ODP, IODP), both shore-based and at sea, having participated in Legs 33, 61 and 143 in the Pacific Ocean. He was a graduate student at Leicester University, working on Jurassic pelagic sediments in Sicily, a post-doctoral research fellow in Basel, Switzerland and lectured in Cambridge and Durham before moving to Oxford, where he is Professor of Stratigraphy.

Ellen Thomas received her undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, with a PhD thesis (1979) focused on evolution in Mio-Pliocene benthic Foraminifera from Crete (Greece). After a short period as postdoctoral scholar working on airborne particulates at Arizona State University, she joined the Deep-Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) at Scripps Institute of Oceanography (University of California, San Diego) as staff scientist (1982). This position strongly influenced her later career: she returned to benthic foraminifera, mostly in materials from the deep-sea recovered by DSDP and its successors, including the present International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP), while filling positions at Cambridge University, Yale University, and Wesleyan University. She was instrumental in the discovery of the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, for which she received AGU’s Maurice Ewing medal (2012). She was awarded the Brady Medal of The Micropalaeontological Society in 2016.

I am a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Southampton in Ocean and Earth Sciences where I’ve been for the last twelve years. Since having my first child three years ago I work part-time, juggling life with my husband and two young children alongside research, teaching and making pottery. My research focus is to understand one part of the marine ecosystem, the coccolithophorid phytoplankton that lie at the base of the food chain. Specifically, I use the fossil record to address how coccolithophores have responded to past climate change and apply this information to help understand the future of modern plankton communities. In recent years I’ve moved in the direction of integrating modern and palaeo-biology, merging culture experiments with geological data, resulting in a shift towards a cellular-level focus on plankton evolution and its driving mechanisms.

Mike Benton has studied mass extinction for some time, and his particular focus is the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, 252 million years ago. He is particularly interested in the physical and biological effects of mass extinctions on land, and has worked in the field in Russia and China, pursuing these questions. Mike is a vertebrate palaeontologist, so this interest extends to studies of reptiles of the Triassic and the origin of the dinosaurs. He has written many papers and books on these topics, and has supervised over 60 PhD students. He is head of the Palaeobiology Research Group in Bristol, and the world-famous Masters in Palaeobiology, from which more than 350 students have graduated.

Pincelli Hull is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geology & Geophysics at Yale University. She received her PhD from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2010 and joined the faculty at Yale in 2013 after postdoctoral research at Yale University and the University of Konstanz. Hull’s research focuses on the relationship between open ocean life and the environment during mass extinctions, abrupt climatic events, and changes in background climate state. Her publications span events from the late Cretaceous to the modern day, and typically focus on the fossil record of plankton, particularly planktonic foraminifera. She has recently been awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship in Ocean Science for her work.

Lee R. Kump is Professor and Head of Geosciences at Penn State. He received his A.B. degree in geophysical sciences from the University of Chicago in 1981 and his Ph.D. in marine sciences from the University of South Florida in 1986. He has been on the faculty of the Department of Geosciences at Penn State since 1986. He is the senior author of the textbook "The Earth System," now in its third edition. Other books include “Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change,” co-authored with Michael Mann, now in its second edition, and  “Mathematical Modeling in the Geosciences: A Primer” with Rudy Slingerland. He has published over 100 refereed papers and book chapters on a wide range of Earth science topics. Kump's research interests include the evolution of ocean and atmosphere composition on geologic time scales, biogeochemical cycling in aquatic environments, the behavior of nutrient and trace elements in natural environments, human impact on coastal environments including coral reefs, and environmental change during extreme events (mass extinctions, extreme warm periods, glaciations) in Earth history.

Kump is a fellow of the Geological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, the Geochemical Society, the European Association of Geochemistry, and the Geological Society of London. He received the Distinguished Service Medal from the Geological Society of America in 2000, and is a Distinguished Alumnus of the University of South Florida (2009).

His research has been featured in documentaries that have aired on NOVA Science Now, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, BBC, Australian Broadcast Corporation, and the History Channel.

Lucas Lourens graduated in 1994 on Plio-Pleistocene climate changes in the Mediterranean Sea and continued his research through postdoc positions at the Utrecht University, Free University of Amsterdam and CNRS-Cerege in Aix en Provence. He received a NWO-funded Vidi award in 2002 to study the changes in the speed of the Earth’s rotational axis on geological time scales and became a permanent staff member of the Stratigraphy & Palaeontology group of the Faculty of Geosciences (UU). He participated in ODP/IODP expeditions to the Walvis Ridge (Leg 208) and Gulf of Cadiz (EXP 339). In 2010, he received the prestigious NWO-funded Vici award, which enabled him to build his own research group with as main theme to investigate the influence and evolution of astronomically-forced climate changes during the Cenozoic Greenhouse and Icehouse Worlds. From February 1, 2011 he became appointed as chair of the Paleoclimatology group and was honoured with the Jean Baptiste Lamarck medal for his achievements in stratigraphy at the European Geosciences Union of 2016.

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Dr. Morgan F. Schaller is Assistant Professor of geochemistry and Associate Director of the Environmental Sciences program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He earned Bachelors degrees in both Geology and Biology from Binghamton University, completed a PhD at Rutgers University, followed by postdoctoral research positions at Rutgers and Brown University. His primary research focuses on the long-term variation in atmospheric gas concentrations and their influence on deep-time paleoclimate and the evolution of complex life. Dr. Schaller uses stable isotope and vapor inclusion geochemistry to study the detailed records of mass extinctions and other major events as components of an evolving Earth system.

Sandra Kirtland Turner is an assistant professor of paleoclimatology and paleoceanography at the University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on applying a coupled data-model approach to quantitatively reconstruct carbon cycle and climate processes on a warm Earth, particularly in response to episodes of rapid climate change. She specializes in the generation of high-resolution geochemical records from ocean sediment cores and focuses on interpreting these records through the development and application of Earth system models that can simulate physical and biogeochemical process in the atmosphere, oceans, and deep-sea sediments over a variety of timescales.

How sensitive is our climate system to the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane? What are the biogeochemical consequences of adding carbonic acid (CO2 dissolved in rainwater) to the ocean? How sensitive are organisms and ecosystems to all these changes? Because of the complexity of the Earth’s climate system, and often, simply because of our lack of imagination about all the different ways in which the Earth can respond to being poked, a comprehensive answer to these questions is extremely difficult to achieve, even with our best climate and carbon cycle models. Understanding the past can help, as Earth history is characterised by an extraordinary richness of climatic and carbon cycling behaviour. My work surrounds creating computer model representations of the key Earth system components and applying them in interrogating the past so as to help better constrain the future.

Dr. Richard E. Zeebe is a faculty member at the University of Hawaii. His research focuses on the global carbon cycle, biogeochemistry, geology, paleoceanography, astrochronology and more. His interests range from physico-chemical properties of molecules and the biogeochemistry of foraminifera to the scale of the global ocean and the solar system. Together with Dieter Wolf-Gladrow he published a book on the CO2 chemistry in seawater which has been referred to as the CO2 survival kit. Dr. Zeebe received a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Bremen (Germany). He has served as editor of the journals Climate of the Past and Paleoceanography.

Jeffrey T. Kiehl, Ph.D. is a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where he heads the Climate Change Research Section. Over the past 30 years he has carried out research on a wide range of scientific questions regarding anthropogenic climate change. He has published over one hundred articles on the effects of greenhouse gases on Earth’s climate, the effects of stratospheric ozone depletion on climate, and the effects of aerosols on the climate system. He is the co-author of Frontiers of Climate Modeling published by Cambridge University Press. His current research is on Earth’s deep past climates and future climate change. He is also participates in projects to better communicate climate science to the public. He chaired the Community Climate System Model project at NCAR for a number of years. He has been a member of the National Research Council’s Climate Research Committee and the Committee for Global Change and has served on a number of NRC panels over the past twenty years. He is a Fellow of both the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union.