Early-career researcher exchange
Dr. Jaime L. Toney, University of Glasgow (Theme 3)
In the Fall of 2012 SAGES funded a research visit to the Unites States with the
primary purpose for me to work with Dr. Mark Pagani’s research group at Yale
University to develop a compound-specific isotopic records from the Eocene (55
Ma) Antarctic that has implications for the carbon and hydrological cycles during
this Greenhouse period.
I worked in Dr. Pagani’s laboratory from April 1 to April 28th, 2013. During this time
I developed a carbon stable-isotope record from the Eocene section of an Antarctic
IODP core in conjunction with Srinath Krishnan’s (PhD student) hydrogen stableisotope record from the same samples. We worked together to prepare a
manuscript with strong implications for the role of high latitude peatlands as a
feedback in global climate change. The added data points to the carbon isotopic
record show that major changes in the carbon cycle, particularly peatland microbial
membrane lipids, occurred along time periods in tune with Milankovitch cycles.
These findings indicate that changes in peatlands on the ice-free Antarctic likely
played an important feedback role in the release of greenhouse gases that recur
over insolation cycles. This manuscript should have broad implications and appeal
to the scientific community and will be submitted to Nature following the
acceptance and publication of the temperature reconstruction used for comparison
of our data in the journal Climates of the Past Discussions. The joint work on this
allows us to propose a new cause and effect relationship between the terrestrial
carbon cycle and the hydrological cycle that questions the current paradigm in this
greenhouse world.
During my stay at Yale, I attended the Yale Climate and Energy Institute (YCEI)
conference on ‘Water the Looming Crises’. The timing of this conference allowed me
to meet with researchers from Columbia University (Gavin Schmidt) and Purdue
University (Dr. Matt Huber) who are global climate modelers working specifically
two of my research areas, droughts in central North America and Early Eocene
paleoclimate. Two additional high-impact manuscripts are underway with Matt
Huber (now at University of New Hampshire) (1) to use NOAA CIRES 20th Century
reanalysis model to assess teleconnections associated with the large droughts in
central North America, and (2) to use his high resolution global climate model for
the Early Eocene to test hypotheses from the biomarker data related to the role of
obliquity in forcing of peatland, atmospheric carbon and hydrological changes.
Since being awarded the SAGES funding in March 2013, I have changed positions
from a Postdoctoral Research Associate to Lecturer in Organic Geochemistry at the
University of Glasgow. As a result, my research aims and projects have changed
somewhat and I was able to take advantage of this during my time at Yale. The data
acquired during this trip is used as the Scientific Rationale for the submission of a
NERC Standard Grant (July 2013) and two applications to the NERC IAPETUS
studentship call. These submissions extend the scope of the previous work to
Scottish peatlands and include further collaborations with SAGES member Susan
Waldron.
During my visit to the U.S., I also gave an invited talk in the Department of
Geosciences at Brown University. This research talk sparked interest in
collaborating on algal culturing and development alkenone biomarkers. I am
currently culturing haptophyte algae in the laboratory in collaboration with a NSFfunded PhD student, William Longo, and Dr. Yongsong Huang. Pilot data from this
project was used to submit a proposal for a studentship through the Hydro Nation,
which is aimed at managing Scotland’s water resources to its best advantage.