Research
Ice Core Stable Isotopes
For my PhD research, I study the chemical composition of ice cores to learn about the Earth’s past climate.
Heavier noble gases are more soluble in water than light noble gases. Because of this, we can look for places where the heavy to light ratio of noble gases increases and identify those layers as times when melting happened in the past. This can tell us when anomalously warm summers occurred in the Arctic, furthering our understanding of climate processes.
In this picture, I’m going through some sections of the RECAP ice core to select the most useful samples for analysis.
Marsh Biogeochemistry
In undergrad, I studied silicon (Si) cycling in the Sage Lot Pond marsh on Cape Cod, MA, USA. Marshes are a large source of dissolved Si to adjacent coastal ecosystems, where primary producers like diatoms rely on it to grow. We found that secondary mineral weathering in marsh sediments is the primary source of dissolved Si from marshes.
Our findings have been published in Biogeochemistry.