The chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans, which has an enormous impact on Earth’s climate, has changed dramatically over the 4.5 billion years of Earth history. Our research group seeks to better understand how the fundamental coupled components of the Earth system—the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and solid Earth—interact to regulate the chemical composition of the ocean-atmosphere system and how this has changed over the past ~1 billion years. In particular, our research is driven by the hypothesis that sulfur plays a critical role in regulating the marine carbon cycle.
Towards this end, we conduct studies of both modern and ancient sedimentary systems integrating field observations with a variety of geochemical tools (e.g., stable isotopes, elemental abundances) and combine these efforts with simple geochemical models.
This work is funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Agouron Institute.
