Lowell Stott
University of Southern California, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
During the last ice age, air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice show that atmospheric carbon dioxide was about 30% lower than before industrialization. Where did that carbon go?
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
paleoclimate
paleoceanography
Last Glacial Maximum
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Collect sediment cores from high-sedimentation-rate sites in the deep western North Pacific during a research cruise to fill a major data gap.
- Measure high-resolution radiocarbon and stable isotope records to estimate how long deep Pacific waters stayed isolated from the surface during the Last Glacial Maximum.
- Test whether a more sluggish deep-ocean circulation let respired carbon build up in the abyssal Pacific, lowering ice-age atmospheric carbon dioxide.
More about the research
One leading idea is that the deep ocean circulated more slowly, so carbon released by decaying organic matter built up in the deep Pacific, the ocean's largest potential carbon store. Testing this has been hard because there are few detailed records from the deep Pacific. This collaborative project tackles one of paleoclimate science's central questions: what controls carbon dioxide levels between ice ages and warm periods?
Why it matters
The work adds understanding of how the ocean and atmosphere exchange carbon dioxide over ice-age cycles. Knowing whether a slower deep ocean stored carbon in the past could eventually inform how scientists think about the ocean's role in controlling atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Patrick Rafter
University of South Florida, FL·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether Indian Ocean bottom water was unusually old during the last ice age by comparing the radiocarbon ages of fossil shells with sediment ages in four new cores from across the basin.
Jordan Abell
Lehigh University, PA·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether North Pacific deep-water formation and an active Pacific Meridional Overturning Circulation existed during the warm Pliocene, using multi-proxy records from four IODP sediment cores.
Jean Lynch-Stieglitz
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Earth & Environmental Science
Test how changes in tropical winds alter thermocline depth across the Indo-Pacific by running sensitivity experiments in a high-resolution ocean model.
The school
University of Southern California: 47 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
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