Research

My research sits where the cryosphere, the ocean, and software engineering meet. The unifying question: how do the slow components of the climate system — ice sheets and deep ocean circulation — respond to forcing, and where are the thresholds beyond which that response becomes abrupt?

Ice-sheet ↔ climate coupling

General circulation models and ice-sheet models traditionally run in separate worlds. I work on interactively coupling them, so that a growing or collapsing ice sheet feeds back on the atmosphere and ocean that shape it — and vice versa. This matters most for understanding the Greenland Ice Sheet's past and future: present-day Greenland still carries the memory of the Holocene, and getting that memory right changes our projections of future sea-level contribution.

Stable water isotopes through the Quaternary

Water isotopes (δ¹⁸O, δD) are the connective tissue between models and the paleo-archives we use to test them. I build isotope-enabled simulations that let model output be compared directly against ice cores and marine sediments, turning proxy records into genuine model constraints rather than loose analogies.

AMOC multi-stability & tipping points

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation may have more than one stable state. I study the conditions under which it flips, and what that means for the abrupt climate transitions written into the paleoclimate record — work that speaks directly to the question of climate-system tipping points under anthropogenic forcing.

Reproducible earth-system modelling

None of the above is possible without infrastructure. A large part of my work is making coupled models runnable, reproducible, and shareable across very different HPC systems — which is where esm-tools comes in. I treat this as research in its own right: the methods of computational science deserve the same rigour as the science they enable.