Profile

Since I theoretically retired I have taken an Earth Sciences degree with the Open University and started a PhD at Reading, which I now do part time. I live near Henley-on-Thames with my family, I row at Henley Rowing Club when permitted by floods and Covid, and I haven’t climbed a Himlayan mountain since 1992.

Even before Covid I worked in my back bedroom rather than the University – I hate commuting and in any case all my work is with data which means all I need is a laptop and broadband. 20 years ago this wouldn’t have been an option.

Occasionally (Covid permitting) I get to help Geography and Environmental Sciences undergraduates with simple lab work like identifying minerals and rocks and understanding Earth processes.

Climate strongly affects what vegetation you find in the landscape, and (some) plants give off a lot of pollen. This collects in ponds and lakes, and as mud and silt build up you get a record over time of the changes in pollen. If you use a drainpipe-like drill you can take a “core” out of the lake bed. Luckily other people did the wet muddy bit, and also stared down microscopes for years identifying the different kinds of pollen. All I do is use their data, which should tell us about the changing climate as the pollen was deposited.

My current work focuses on the last glacial (~20,000 years ago to ~120,000 years ago) in Europe. This work helps answer questions about the fate of vegetation under current and future climate change.

Did you know that during this time, there are at least 20 periods of rapid temperature increases (Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles) with similar rates of change to what the world is currently experiencing? Sometimes warming by 10 degrees in a generation?  Did you know that 20,000 years ago the sea level was 120 m below where it is now, because of all the water locked up in the great ice sheets on North America and Scandinavia? The English Channel was empty and the shore was out near Ireland. Coastlines are very temporary things.

Research is rarely linear – collect samples, analyse samples in the lab, analyse the data, write up the wonderful new discovery.  Oh no. It’s more like a bush and you are an ant. You crawl up each twig to see if there’s anything valuable there – no – back down, next twig – maybe – next twig – no – … and so on. Each twig is a small question which is a sub-part of the big question you are trying to answer, and the question may change in the process. After all, if you knew to start with what you were going to get out the other end, what would have been the point? It’s exploration of a blank on the map of science.

All my work over the past 3 years (I took a year out) is about extracting information from what innocently simple data – tables of maybe 60 kinds of plant pollen and how much of each kind there is in maybe 200 samples taken from the core, and I work on a dozen cores. This sounds simple, but if research has taught me one thing, it is that supposedly simple stuff and commonly used techniques aren’t what they seem. Also pollen records are “noisy” – the climate signal isn’t that clear. Most of my work is torturing the data in all sorts of ways to get it to admit something useful by writing software in R on my laptop, which is enormously powerful but can be pretty complex to use. Some of this might be described as statistics, to which I am allergic. My understanding and imagination is visual and geometrical – I have colleagues who think in algebra and I can’t do that.

Recently I and a colleague have had to spend weeks pulling apart a frequently-used piece of “black box” software which everyone assumed was doing x when in fact it wasn’t, and rebuilding something better. You can’t trust it just because someone published it – be sceptical. If something doesn’t make sense, then either (a) it was wrong and/or (b) it wasn’t worth investing time in. (Applies in business too.)

So a lot of my time so far has gone into “how to” do the reconstructions of climate rather than actually doing it. I even published a “how to/how not to” paper last summer in Quaternary Research, some of which was frankly pretty obvious.

Climate strongly affects what vegetation you find in the landscape, and (some) plants give off a lot of pollen. This collects in ponds and lakes, and as mud and silt build up you get a record over time of the changes in pollen. If you use a drainpipe-like drill you can take a “core” out of the lake bed. Luckily other people did the wet muddy bit, and also stared down microscopes for years identifying the different kinds of pollen. All I do is use their data, which should tell us about the changing climate as the pollen was deposited.

My current work focuses on the last glacial (~20,000 years ago to ~120,000 years ago) in Europe. This work helps answer questions about the fate of vegetation under current and future climate change.

Did you know that during this time, there are at least 20 periods of rapid temperature increases (Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles) with similar rates of change to what the world is currently experiencing? Sometimes warming by 10 degrees in a generation?  Did you know that 20,000 years ago the sea level was 120 m below where it is now, because of all the water locked up in the great ice sheets on North America and Scandinavia? The English Channel was empty and the shore was out near Ireland. Coastlines are very temporary things.

Research is rarely linear – collect samples, analyse samples in the lab, analyse the data, write up the wonderful new discovery.  Oh no. It’s more like a bush and you are an ant. You crawl up each twig to see if there’s anything valuable there – no – back down, next twig – maybe – next twig – no – … and so on. Each twig is a small question which is a sub-part of the big question you are trying to answer, and the question may change in the process. After all, if you knew to start with what you were going to get out the other end, what would have been the point? It’s exploration of a blank on the map of science.