Maureen Raymo

Maureen E. Raymo (born December 27, 1959 in Los Angeles ) is an American paleoclimatologist , oceanographer and marine geologist .

Life

Raymo graduated from Brown University with a bachelor's degree in 1982 and Columbia University with a master's degree in 1985 and a PhD in 1989. She was a post-doctoral student at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and the University of Melbourne. In 1991 she became an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley , was from 1992 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and from 2000 Associate Professor at Boston University . She has been Professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Director of the Lamont-Doherty Core Repository since 2011 .

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Together with William Ruddiman and Philip Froelich , she developed the theory in 1988 that increased chemical weathering during mountain formation contributes to the cooling of the climate, for example after the formation of the Himalayas (and possibly triggered the last ice ages). Originally, the marine strontium isotope ratio was seen as a support for the thesis, but its suitability as a test was increasingly doubted from 1992 onwards.

In 2005 she and Lorraine Lisiecki published a curve of the proportion of oxygen isotopes in shells of deep-sea foraminifera from 57 deep-sea cores, which shows the development of the world climate (e.g. global ice volume) over the last 5.5 million years ( Lisiecki-Raymo δ18O Stack ).

Lisiecki-Raymo curve

In 2006 she published a hypothesis to explain why periodicities in the global ice volume of 41,000 years (the Milankovich cycle of the inclination of the earth's axis) were characteristic for the period from about 3 million years ago to about 800,000 years ago, while the precessional The period of around 20,000 years was barely pronounced, although the solar radiation varies the most in summer with it. According to Raymo, this has to do with the fact that the precession effect worked in opposite directions at both poles (while the ice layer increased on one pole, it decreased on the other), while the effect of the change in the inclination of the earth's axis worked similarly.

In 2011, she published a study with Jerry Mitrovica, Michael J. O'Leary, Robert M. DeConto and Paul L. Hearty that the rise in sea level in the warm period around 400,000 years ago, which was reflected in fossil coastlines in the Bahamas, was lower than previously assumed, as, for example, the Bahamas sank at that time due to isostatic adjustment after the glaciers in North America melted. According to Raymo and colleagues, the sea level was only 6 to 13 m higher than today (Hearty had assumed up to 21 m in 1999). The West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Greenland Ice Sheet had melted then, but the East Antarctic Ice Sheet had not.

In 2013 she and colleagues published an explanation for the dominance of the 100,000 year cycle in the climate of the late Pleistocene (from around 800,000 years ago to the present), which is one of the Milanković cycles , but its influence on solar radiation is less than that of others Milankovic cycles is. Even the abrupt end of the Ice Age cycles cannot be explained by astronomical influences alone. Raymo and colleagues found that the greater the extent of the ice sheet, the greater the sensitivity to small changes in solar radiation.

She also researched the warm period in the Pliocene, when the mean temperature was about three degrees higher than today, although the external framework conditions were similar to today. In particular, she investigated in Australia how high the sea level was at that time above today, about which there are different estimates of 5 to 30 m.

She and her father, Chet Raymo (professor of physics and astronomy at Stonehill College and science columnist at Boston Globe) wrote a popular science book on geology.

Awards

She received the National Young Investigator Award. In 2014 she was the first woman to receive the Wollaston Medal and the Milutin Milankovic Medal of the European Geosciences Union . In 2003/04 she was a Guggenheim Fellow . She received the Cody Award from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In 2016 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences . For 2019, Raymo was awarded the Maurice Ewing Medal by the American Geophysical Union .

Fonts

with WF Ruddiman, PN Froelich: Influence of late Cenozoic mountain building on ocean geochemical cycles, Geology, Volume 16, 1988, pp. 649-653.
with WF Ruddiman, NJ Shackleton , DW Oppo: Evolution of Atlantic Pacific Delta-C-13 Gradients over the Last 2.5 My, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 97, 1990, pp 353-368
with WF Ruddiman: Tectonic forcing of late Cenozoic climate, Nature , Volume 359, 1992, pp. 117-122
The Himalayas, organic carbon burial and climate in the Miocene, Paleoceanography, Volume 9, 1994, pp. 399-404
The timing of major climate terminations, Paleoceanography, Volume 12, 1997, pp. 577-585
with K. Nisancioglu: The 41 kyr world: Milankovitch's other unsolved mystery, Paleoceanography, Volume 18, 2003, p. 1011
with LE Lisiecki: A Pliocene-Pleistocene stack of 57 globally distributed benthic d18O records. Paleoceanography, 20, 2005, PA1003
with LE Lisiecki, Kerim H. Nisancioglu: Plio-Pleistocene Ice Volume, Antarctic Climate, and the Global δ18O Record, Science 313, 2006, pp. 492-495, abstract
with C. Raymo: Written In Stone - a Geological History of the Northeastern United States. The Globe Pequot Press, Chester, Connecticut 1989, 3rd edition Black Dome Press 2007.
with K. Kawamura, FDR Parrenin, L. Lisiecki, R. Uemura, FO Vimeux, JP Severinghaus, MA Hutterli, T. Nakazawa, S. Aoki, J. Jouzel, K. Matsumoto, H.Nakata, H. Motoyama, S. Fujita, K. Goto-Azuma, Y. Fujii, O. Watanabe: Northern Hemisphere forcing of climatic cycles in Antarctica over the past 360,000 years, Nature, Volume 448, 2007, pp. 912-916
with Peter Huybers: Unlocking the mysteries of the Ice Ages, Nature, Volume 451, 2008, pp. 284–285
with LE Lisiecki: Diachronous benthic delta O-18 responses during late Pleistocene terminations, Paleoceanography, Volume 24, 2009, PA 3210
with Jerry Mitrovica, Michael J. O'Leary, Robert M. DeConto, Paul L. Hearty: Departures from eustasy in Pliocene sea-level records, Nature Geoscience, Volume 4, 2011, pp. 328-332
Ayako Abe-Ouchi, Fuyuki Saito, Kenji Kawamura, Jun'ichi Okuno, Kunio Takahashi, Heinz Blatter: Insolation-driven 100,000-year glacial cycles and hysteresis of ice-sheet volume, Nature, Volume 500, 2013, pp. 190–193 , Abstract

Web links

References and comments

personal data
SURNAME	Raymo, Maureen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Raymo, Maureen E.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American geologist and paleoclimatologist
DATE OF BIRTH	December 27, 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH	los Angeles

[1] Rich Barlow, Using the Past to Predict Global Warming's Future, Boston University

[2] Lamont Doherty Observatory on Receipt of the Wollaston Medal , 2014

[3] Milankovich Medal