I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Utah. I study paleoclimatology and paleoceanography, focusing on the coupling of climate and the carbon cycle over long and short timescales in the geologic past. I use trace element and stable isotope geochemical proxies in marine (e.g., fossil foraminifera) and terrestrial (e.g., paleosol carbonates) sediments, to determine temperature, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and seawater chemistry (e.g., ocean acidification, shifts in sea surface salinity) in the past.

I develop Bayesian hierarchical models to translate between proxy data and past environmental conditions. In part, I work on abrupt climate events associated with shifts in atmospheric carbon concentrations (i.e., carbon isotope excursions, including early Eocene hyperthermals and Cretaceous OAEs), as carbon release case studies to better understand the sensitivity of climate and carbon cycle feedbacks to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

I'm a contributor to the CO2 Proxy Integration Project (CO2PIP).

I'm a member of the SPATIAL (Spatio-Temporal Isotopes Analytics Lab) group at the University of Utah.

-How much did temperature, sea surface pH, and CO2 change during global warming events of the early Eocene (hyperthermals)?

-What was the spatial response of temperature and sea surface salinity change during hyperthermal events, and how does the latter relate to heat-driven shifts in the hydrological cycle?

-How are temperature and atmospheric CO2 coupled over long (Myrs) and short (kyrs) timescales?

-How senstive was the climate to CO2 released into the atmosphere during the past, and how does this change across timescales?

-Were cool intervals during the Aptian-Albian driven by low atmospheric CO2?

-How has atmospheric CO2 changed over the past 66 Myr? 541 Myr?

-Can we develop a community-accessible Bayesian proxy system model that incorporates commonly applied measurements in fossil planktic foraminifera (stable boron, carbon and oxygen isotopes, B/Ca, Mg/Ca) to interpret the past environment, including atmospheric CO2?

-What other proxy systems can we forward model using Markhov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approaches?

Dustin T. Harper