Professor Emeritus; Ph.D., Columbia University, 1969.

Marine Geology, Paleoclimatology; paleoceanography.

211 Clark Hall
434-924-7964
wfr5c@virginia.edu

My research focuses on ocean sediments that contain diverse indicators of Earth's climate change over time scales ranging from thousands to tens of millions of years. Examples include records of regional aridity (windblown desert dust), oceanic productivity (fluxes of calcareous and siliceous planktonic organisms), and ice volume and temperature (stable-isotopic measurements). In addition, through co-operative experiments using numerical models of the earth's atmospheric and oceanic circulation, we devise and test hypotheses about the driving forces behind climatic changes, both longer-term tectonic changes (uplift of plateaus) and shorter-term variations in the earth-sun geometry ("orbital" changes).