Eva Niedermeyer has been working in my labs at Caltech -- first as a visitor during her PhD, and later as a postdoc -- for almost 4 years now. Alas, she has finally finished her work here and moves on to the next big thing. While at Caltech, Eva employed compound-specific D/H measurements of leaf waxes contained in marine sediment cores to investigate changes in tropical climate and hydrology. She first worked on cores collected off the western coast of Senegal to produce a 44,000 year record of variations in the West-African monsoon. The results, published in Quaternary Science Reviews (pdf), show that there were two significantly wetter periods in western Africa from 38-28 and 15-4 kyr, and that these intervals correspond to periods of maximum summer insolation. Next, as a postdoc, she has worked on several cores from western Sumatra, producing a 24,000-year record of precipitation intensity. Remarkably, in this part of the world there appears to have been relatively little change in precipitation intensity over the last glacial/interglacial transition, a finding that contrasts markedly with stalagmite records from further east in Indonesia. A manuscript with these results is currently in review.
Eva moves on to the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt, where she will be using the tools of isotope biogeochemistry to study the affects of climate change on plant ecology, as well as continuing to work on proxy records of paleoclimate. You can read more on her home page.
