Ph.D. candidate – Earth & Planetary Science
Hello!
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Earth & Planetary Science at the University of California, Berkeley
My research seeks to understand the triggers behind long-term changes in climate throughout Earth’s history through a combination of:
statistical methods and numeric modeling
field observations and measurements
lab analyses on collected samples
gauges indicate relative time spent in each
I mostly focus on trying to understand the long-term drivers of climate change.
Very rarely throughout Earth’s history, the whole planet manages to plunge itself into a globally glaciated state. In particular, ~717 million years ago, Earth entered one of these dramatic “Snowball Earth” glacial events after about 1.5 billion years of relatively clement climatic conditions.
Over the past 15 million years, Earth’s climate has been cooling. Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain this cooling trend, but with no consensus. The Southeast Asian islands have been emerging over the same time period, and represent an outsized contribution to modern carbon dioxide consumption.
Are the Southeast Asian islands responsible for cooling over the past 15 million years?
On million year time scales, Earth’s climate mostly fluctuates between a warm ice-free state and a cooler glacial state in which finite ice caps exist at the poles.
What processes are responsible for setting Earth’s long-term climate state?
~1000-550 million years ago, Earth witnessed several events that were critical for shaping our planet as it exists today, including the rapid evolution of microbial life and a rise in atmospheric oxygen to near-modern levels. Given that the Earth system is very sensitive to the configuration of the continents at any given time, constraining where the continents were throughout this time is critical for better understanding these important events.
Data is awesome!
I’m passionate about applying cutting-edge computational techniques to solve problems from a data-centric perspective.
Some non-research-related machine learning projects that I have worked on in my spare time …
… I also develop pystrat, a Python package for convenient stratigraphic plotting and analysis …
… and once in a while I’ll write a brief post about something I learned in the hope that it will be useful for someone else.
Some places that research and life have taken me to.
images taken using Nikon d7000 with 35mm prime lens
