Dr. Thomas Westerhold

A solid understanding of how the climate system operates and the extent to which human activities affect the future climate is of the utmost relevance to our modern society. Geoscientists are making major scientific efforts globally to predict future climate change pathways.

A key part of this is the detailed reconstruction of the evolution of the Earth's climate and how it behaved in the geological past.Much of our present understanding of the development of the global environment over millions of years comes from drilling deep ocean deposits.These marine deposits, known as sediments, contain an archive that continuously records and preserves past climate information from different spatial and temporal conditions.

My research focuses on reconstructing the stability of past climates, as well as the causes and consequences of climate disruptions recorded in deep sea sediments. In collaboration with scientists around the world, I aim to understand how the Earth's climate functions under conditions that are warmer than they are today, and to explore what the safe operating space of our planet is.

Timing is crucial to gaining a fundamental understanding of cause and effect in the Earth's climate system and to assessing the impact of massive climatic changes on the living world. Therefore, my research focuses on creating highly accurate age models for geochemical data from deep-sea sediments, which have uniquely recorded the last 100 million years of our planet's geological history.