I am interested in detailed investigation of the recent (<20,000 years) history of environmental and climatic change in the tropics. My research began with an investigation of tropical glaciation and has evolved into studying sediments of glacial lakes and large, intermontane lakes such as Lake Titicaca on the border between Peru and Bolivia. The tropics have been my geographic region of interest because: generally, there is a lack of paleoclimatic information from the low latitudes; the tropics have been described as the "heat engine" of the Earth impacting the global energy and trace gas budgets; the presence of various climate phenomena that involve study on interannual (e.g. El Niño-Southern Oscillation) to millennial (e.g. Orbital) time scales.

The common link between the geomorphic and sedimentologic study of glaciers and lakes is that both can viewed as hydrologic systems that respond sensitively to changes in their energy and mass budgets. Glaciers change in size in response to the mass received and the energy available to ablate stored ice. Lake levels and chemistry respond to hydrologic input and residence time, which is a function of basin hydrology and the energy for evaporation. The end results are archives of these changes encapsulated in glacial moraines, ancient shorelines, and the nature and chemistry of lake sediments. Given the complexity of the mass and energy budget of these systems, inverse modeling to determine climate change from paleoclimate proxies usually involves a series of potential solutions. The advantage of working with lake sediments is that relatively continuous and datable records of change are extractable compared to the discontinuous geomorphic record of glaciation. However, both sets of records complement one another because the glacial record can be traced over large geographic regions and lake sediments provide temporal continuity and multiple proxies.

The ultimate goal of this research in tropical paleoclimates is to understand the natural variability of changes that occur on a number of time scales. The development of these records allows us to hypothesize about and to test different mechanisms that can drive tropical climate change. We can also compare our records with those at higher latitudes to understand which changes are global, hemispheric, or regional and to investigate leads and lags in the large-scale climate system. Eventually this type of research may also be useful in understanding what is anthropogenically forced versus natural variability in contemporary tropical climate. For my website about my research in paleoclimates of the northern and southern hemispheres, please click here.

For more information about me, please click here.

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This page last updated on January 3, 2003.