Research
Extracting the history of the Earth from the rock record is tough, but we do our best
How much life has ever existed, and how much will ever exist?
A large portion of our work has been focused on whether we can quantify the productivity of the ancient biosphere. Since primary production fuels all life on the planet, quantifying this variable offers access to some fundamental questions about our planet. For example, how much life has ever existed and will ever exist? How many cells have ever inhabited the Earth? Currently we are working hard to refine current answers to these questions and are exploring changes in productivity across critical intervals of Earth’s past.
Cryogenian Glaciations (Snowball Earth)
Snowball Earth glaciations captured my interest to study Earth history. The observation that the Earth was once completely covered in ice provides a fascinating series of follow up questions and luckily strata around the world provide an exciting record to answer these.
Revisiting the fidelity and global nature of sedimentary archives
Underlying many works archiving the evolution of our planet is that sedimentary archives are faithful recorders of marine chemistry. Recent work primarily utilizing Ca isotopes are raising serious concerns about this assumption which is beginning to change the questions which should be asked from sedimentary archives. Moreover, which sedimentary rocks should even be included in global seawater compilations in the first place? We are currently exploring and developing tools to aid in deciphering local versus global signatures in the sedimentary record.