Research Interests

As a pa­leo­cea­no­gra­pher, un­ra­ve­ling en­vi­ron­men­tal pro­xy si­gnals from past warm climate con­di­ti­ons as recorded in marine sediments is my bre­ad & but­ter. 

Three "warmer-than-present" Epochs of in­te­rest:

• Pliocene (transition from uni-polar to bi-polar ice sheets)
• Eocene (transition from ice-free conditions to isolated uni-polar ice caps)
• Late Devonian (ice-free greenhouse climate state). 

My re­se­arch fo­cus lies on climate - carbon cycle feedback mechanisms (and their chan­ging re­s­pon­se to as­tro­no­mi­cal for­cing) under non-Quaternary boundary conditions. For ex­amp­le, on a pla­net with uni­po­lar ice-sheets, on a pla­net wi­thout 8000 m high Hi­ma­la­y­an moun­ta­ins, on a pla­net with a wide-open In­do­ne­si­an Through­flow, or on a pla­net with more than 500 ppm CO2. To do so, I stu­dy se­veral geo­lo­gi­cal epochs: the Late De­vo­ni­an (~375 Ma), the Eo­ce­ne (~40 Ma) and the Plio­ce­ne (~5 Ma). None of the­se time sli­ces are per­fect ana­lo­gues for the An­thro­po­ce­ne, yet they are worth stu­dy­ing as they pro­vi­de va­luable in­sights into the ma­chine­ry of the cli­ma­te sys­tem un­der boun­da­ry con­di­ti­ons much un­li­ke to­day’s. Ob­vious­ly, the age of the se­di­ment(ary rock) un­der in­ves­ti­ga­ti­on is very dif­fe­rent bet­ween the three epochs of in­te­rest, but my work al­ways sha­res a com­mon ob­jec­tive: Integrating the paleoclimate and geochronology aspects of the sedimentary archives to better constrain how much and how fast our planet has been changing. To do so, I draw from my broad skill set (field, lab and nu­me­ri­cal mo­de­ling) and from a wide ran­ge of pro­xies (iso­to­pic, ele­men­tal and geo­phy­si­cal pro­xies).