Andrea Dutton (Principal Investigator)
Andrea holds the Helen Jupnik Endowed Research Professorship in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is also appointed in the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research. She is a carbonate geochemist and sedimentologist with interests in research questions pertaining to paleoclimate and paleoceanography. Andrea has held leadership positions in PALSEA, the PAGES Working Group on Quaternary Interglacials, the NASEM CORES panel, and the Geological Society of America Geochronology Division. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a U.S. Fulbright Scholar, and a Fellow of the Geological Society of America.
Emily Mixon (Lab Manager)
Emily joined SLEUTh Lab after earning undergradaute degrees from the Univeristy of Texas at Austin and completing her PhD in Geoscience at UW-Madison. She has a strong interest in method development and instrumentation for isotope geochemistry and is excited to apply her diverse experiences in clean lab chemistry and mass spectrometry towards the scientific growth of the students and researchers in SLEUTh. Emily has worked across the geologic timescale from the Archean to the Quaternary, and has personal research interests in solid earth/climate interactions. Check out her research website to learn more.
I am earning my PhD in the SLEUTH Lab and am interested in how regional climate has changed over the last few ice ages. Over the last 200,000 years sea level has risen and fallen as global ice volume has grown and shrunk. In turn, these fluctuations lead to shifts in global circulation patterns. By learning about these changes in the past, we can build a deeper understanding of the climate system and more accurately project our climate future. Speleothems – carbonate rocks that form in caves – grow in layers as groundwater drips into the cave leaving mineral behind. These rocks serve as a geochemical climate archive that can be precisely dated using U-Th dating. I am using speleothems to reconstruct past precipitation patterns in the Midwest, as well as to reconstruct the timing of past sea level rise in the Yucatan Peninsula.
I addition to my research, I am the Outreach and Communications Specialist at the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey here in Madison. In this position, I get to spend my time connecting the latest earth science with the everyday experiences of Wisconsinites. Please see my personal website for more information about my research and past outreach efforts, and the Survey website for my current projects!
Over the last 2.5 million years, vast ice sheets have periodically advanced and retreated across North America. The decay and growth of this ice sheet, along with similar ones across the Northern Hemisphere, is an important aspect of balancing the sea-level budget and understanding the global climate system. The history of the most recent retreat is relatively well understood, as researchers are able to look into land-based lines of evidence. However, those lines of evidence don’t exist for older glacial retreats as the most recent advance scraped away past glacial formations. To look into these past glacial retreats, and the corresponding rise in sea level, we instead look to more distant records that might show an effect of the changing ice volumes, such as worldwide records of changes in global climate and the properties of deep ocean sediment cores. By comparing these records with their better-constrained equivalents from the most recent deglaciation, we hope to gain a better understanding of past climatic and sea-level change.
Rudy is also a science writer and podcaster. In summer of 2024, he was a AAAS Mass Media Fellow writing feature stories for Smithsonian Magazine. He hosts the place-based Earth Science podcast Under Our Feet (UOFpod.org), which explores stories of the ways geologic forces and events shape the world we live in. His geology-related writing has appeared on Montana Public Radio and in Wisconsin People & Ideas and Agate magazines.
I am interested in the dynamics of rapid sea-level rise events during Earth’s recent history. Sea-level rise has already begun wreaking havoc on coastal communities globally and will only increase given our imminent climate future. Currently, our understanding of how sea level will evolve with changing climate and ice sheet volume is limited. Studying how sea level has changed during past climate warming events can help us better predict and prepare for a warming climate in the near future. Because many coral species grow close to the ocean surface for access to sunlight, fossil coral reefs can be used to reconstruct the past position of sea level. New ocean drill cores from off-coast of Hawaii provide coral reef sedimentary records spanning back over 500,000 years. I am studying the penultimate deglaciation, a time period when ice sheets melted, but the sea level response is poorly constrained. I am using a combination of U-Th dating techniques, X-ray diffraction, paleobiology, and geophysics to build a precise history of sea level during this time. This project aims to better understand connections and dynamics between ice sheet decline low latitude sea level.
Alexandra Villa (PhD, 2024)
“Resolving Paleoclimate Signals and Building Geoscience Community on a Dynamic Earth”
Peter M. Chutcharavan (PhD, 2020)
“Ice sheet histories and sea-level change during the Last Interglacial and Termination I inferred from fossil corals: an interdisciplinary approach”
Caroline Quanbeck [now Kircos] (MSc, 2020)
“Late Pleistocene Sea-Level Change and Reef Response Inferred from Fossil Reefs at Red Bluff, Western Australia”
Alexandra (Lexa) Skrivanek (PhD, 2019)
“Inferences of Last Interglacial Sea-Level Variability from Circum-Caribbean Fossil Reefs”
Karen Vyverberg [now Wait] (PhD, 2018)
“Reconstructing the Temporal Evolution of Sea Level in the Seychelles during the Last Interglacial”
Kiernan Folz Donahue (MSc, 2014)
“Glacial to Interglacial Climate and Sea-Level Changes Recorded in Submerged Speleothems, Argentarola, Italy”
Jin Li (MSc, 2014)
“Constraining the Last Interglacial Sea Level Signal in the Bahamas”