Climate's Dusty Clues
David McGee is a paleoclimatologist whose work focuses on reconstructing past changes in extra tropical atmospheric circulation and hydrology. He has explored this area through studies of dust blown out of the world's drylands and deposited in the ocean; changes in dryland water balance as reflected in closed-basin lakes; and studies of precipitation source and amount recorded in stalagmites. These studies involve a variety of types of data, but at the center of all of them are uranium-series isotopes, which are used for dating in terrestrial deposits and determination of accumulation rates in marine sediments. David joins the PAOC faculty as an assistant professor in January 2012. He comes to MIT from a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Minnesota, where he held a joint appointment at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
