Research

We are working to understand the interplay between tectonics and 60 million years of climate change on our planet's largest continent. Our field work is concentrated in Mongolia and in eastern Kazakhstan, where we are collecting paleosol and lake sediments for stable isotopic analysis. Our goal is to understand how uplift of the northern Central Asian mountain ranges--such as the Hangay, Sayan, and Altai Mountains--along with global climate change during the Cenozoic has impacted the climate and ecosystems of Central Asia. Recent work has been published in the American Journal of Science (Caves et al., 2014) and in Earth and Planetary Science Letters (Caves et al., 2015).

The Early Eocene Climatic Optimum, occurring roughly 52 million years ago, represents a potential Earth System response to projected CO₂ emissions over the next couple centuries. While global temperatures were much warmer, most of this temperature increase was concentrated at the high latitudes, reducing the Earth’s latitudinal temperature gradient.  This has important implications for the hydrologic cycle, particularly with regards to the transport of latent heat from low to high latitudes.  We have collected isotopic records of this time period from a broad latitudinal range and are comparing them with vapor transport models in order to quantify the relationships between latitudinal gradients of temperature, water vapor, and isotopes under a radically different climatic regime.