2024 (March): I’m very excited to have our tropical rainfall variability paper out for everyone in Nature Communications Earth & Environment (open access) https://rdcu.be/dBByD. We used Great Barrier Reef coral geochemistry to show that as the climate has been warming, tropical rainfall (and rain variability from one year to the next) in Australia has been increasing.

2024 (February): A personal story about my path into studying past and present climate change. University of Michigan Climate Diaries feature

2023 (December): Excited to see our collaborative Cenozoic history of atmospheric CO2 paper in print in Science! https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi5177

2023 (Fall): Two new collaborative papers published, both from the western tropical Pacific, both tracking salinity changes. The first is in Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology and uses coral chemistry from the Holocene https://doi.org/10.1029/2023pa004702 and the second is in Geophysical Research Letters and uses foraminifera chemistry from the Plio-Pleistocene https://doi.org/10.1029/2023gl105983

2022: New collaborative research paper published: “Marginal Reefs Under Stress: Physiological Limits Render Galápagos Corals Susceptible to Ocean Acidification and Thermal Stress” https://doi.org/10.1029/2021AV000509

2020-2021: Along with collaborators, I helped to author two new publications, including: “Symbiont photosynthesis and its effect on boron proxies in planktic foraminifera” https://doi.org/10.1029/2020PA004022 and “PaCTS 1.0 A Crowdsourced Reporting Standard for Paleoclimate Data.” http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2019PA003632

January 2019: With the ongoing government shutdown, the NOAA paleoclimate database website is offline. In the interest of data redundancy during these periods, I have published all the original data from my previous work on this website: https://kelseydyez.com/data/

2018: New paper in Nature Geoscience that came out of the Bern, Switzerland meeting:  Paleoclimate constraints on a future warmer world. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0146-0

November 2018: I have published a new study using boron isotopes to reconstruct past atmospheric CO2 levels from 1.5 million years ago in Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology. This is the first high-resolution record from this time period when the earth had less land ice. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018PA003349

October 2018: Along with collaborators, we have published a new paleoclimate study in Quaternary Research of the isotopic composition of cave deposits from the coast of South Africa. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/quaternary-research/article/late-pleistocene-records-of-speleothem-stable-isotopic-compositions-from-pinnacle-point-on-the-south-african-south-coast/A8E591FAB2DA3170BB54E3B567312258

July 2018: After 4 years of being a postdoc and research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, I have moved to the University of Michigan. It is great to be here. Also, our collaborative review paper just came out in Nature Geosciences and is available here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0146-0 The Earth Institute blog at Columbia University has a nice overview of the research: http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/06/25/2-degrees-warming-paris-agreement/

June 2017: Laura Haynes‘ calibration paper about the B/Ca proxy in Orbulina universa was published in Paleoceanography.

April 2017: I was invited to speak about pCO2 in the early Pleistocene at a workshop in Bern, Switzerland, “Lessons learnt from paleoscience on a possible 1.5–2.0ºC warmer world in the future.” It was great to meet everyone there and I look forward to the forthcoming review paper as a result.

March 2017: We hosted the Cenozoic pCO2 workshop at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory with over 50 participants from 6 countries. The 3-day workshop was productive and brought together many different groups working to reconstruct past atmospheric pCO2 from various natural archives.

December 2016: I reported an update on our work at the American Geophysical Union meeting (AGU) in San Francisco. The topic for this presentation was revisiting published boron-based records of carbon dioxide at Site 999, using updated and coherent methodology.

November 2016: Applications are invited for a Workshop on Cenozoic pCO2 reconstructions from all archives – terrestrial, marine, organic and inorganic. The workshop aims to improve the network and interaction between researchers working on paleo-pCO2 and associated temperature reconstructions, as well as focus on key questions to improve our knowledge on paleo-pCO2 and its climatological consequences.

September 2016: I was invited to speak about Early Pleistocene pCO2 obliquity cycles at the Geological Society of America (GSA) Fall Meeting September 25-28, 2016 in Denver, CO.

July 2016: We have a new paper in press in Paleoceanography entitled, “Evaluating drivers of Pleistocene eastern tropical Pacific sea surface temperature”. To test the proposed mechanisms for what controls eastern Pacific SST (precession-related changes in equatorial insolation, high-latitude controls including insolation or ice-sheet changes, glacial-interglacial atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations) on which timescales, we examine new and existing proxy sea-surface temperature (SST) data from the eastern Pacific and compare them with other climate datasets. This project’s approach relies on time-series analyses over a large number of climate cycles both before and after the mid-Pleistocene transition, ~900 thousand years ago.

In March 2016 I participated in a career development workshop for early-career environmental geoscientists in Boulder, CO. We spoke about grant-writing, excellence in university teaching, and resources available to research-educators.

December 2015: The AGU Fall Meeting is the largest gathering of Earth Scientists in the world with upwards of 24,000 attendees. I presented results from my work at Lamont-Doherty, which looks at reconstructing pCO2 from the geochemical composition of ocean sediments. Conversations and collaborations with other researchers in this and related fields are always an integral part of AGU; thanks to everyone I met and talked with there.

April 2015: Postdoctoral Research Symposium. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory held a research symposium highlighting postdoctoral researchers. Each postdoc gave a 10-minute talk on our research. It was great to hear a little about all the post-doctoral research ongoing at Lamont. I worked on a blog at the Columbia’s Earth Institute exploring CO2 research.

January 2015: Harlem Career Day. Outreach is an important component of most careers–today I met with middle-school students in Harlem as part of their career day activities to discuss what it is like to be an earth scientist. It was great to engage with the students individually afterward and hear about what they are looking for in a science career.

December 2014: Along with coauthors, I published a new paper, in Paleoceanography, another journal from the American Geophysical Union. This paper details some of the data I produced in Barcelona, Spain, using materials from the Agulhas Current area. It also deals with some of the oceanic links between the temperature and salinity of the water passing from the Indian Ocean to the south Atlantic ocean and how climate is then impacted elsewhere in the world. The new data presented are geochemical estimates of sea surface temperature and salinity from sediments taken off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa.

November 2014: In November, a new paper has been published at Geophysical Research Letters titled: Dynamical changes in the tropical Pacific warm pool and zonal SST gradient during the Pleistocene. Many thanks to everyone involved, to the editors and reviewers at GRL and Wiley publishing.

October 17, 2014: This fall I am happy to commence a postdoctoral fellowship with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Last summer I wrote the proposal to work at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory on a few of the specific relationships between climate and carbon dioxide, and last winter found that it had been funded.

February 10, 2014: I’ve recently accepted a lecture position at San Francisco State University and am very glad to be back on the central coast of California, where I’ve done research in the past. I’m teaching a general education course about Oceanography that includes an exciting hands-on lab component. It is rewarding to work with people from a variety of different backgrounds; I hope to convey to this audience the importance of thinking carefully about the ocean and coastal environment. 

September 7, 2013: It has been a big year for conferences. In May I traveled to Jerusalem for a conference dedicated to ocean gateways as mechanisms of oceanic and atmospheric change. I’ve just returned from two more meetings at the end of the summer: a Goldschmidt geochemistry meeting and the International Conference on Paleoclimate. Both were informative meetings with friends and colleagues, meeting new ones, and talking about the new ideas and data that are coming online.

February 10, 2013: Our recent paper on tropical climate sensitivity to greenhouse gas forcing was published in the January issue of Geology and can be accessed on this site. Data from this project is available from Geology or the NCDC database.

November 26, 2012: I’ve just analyzed the first foraminifera isotope from my time in Barcelona. It feels good to feel the balance of laboratory work and other forms of learning and research.

October 25, 2012: Geology has just released the pre-publication of our paper on tropical climate sensitivity to atmospheric greenhouse gas forcing. Part of this is the work I presented at AGU last year and the geochemistry meeting this summer in Montreal.

About: I am an educator and researcher in the fields of Geochemistry and Climate Change.  My work primarily examines geologically recent climate and oceanographic changes and implications for future climate change. One of the fundamental goals of this work is to understand how changing greenhouse gas concentrations and regional temperature changed in the past and will change in the future.

I am very interested in projects to provide decision makers with the tools, background, and scientific expertise to make sound environmental choices.

I am also dedicated to education and public outreach. I taught undergraduate Earth Science courses and advised undergraduate theses at San Francisco State University, UC Santa Cruz, Columbia University, and University of Michigan.

In my spare time I hike, explore, and enjoy the outdoors.

View my LinkedIn Profile for recent updates.