Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

Jared Nirenberg is interested in the climate of Earth's polar regions in the geologic past, about 15 million years ago. To research this, he uses marine sediment cores and analyze biomarkers, which are molecules produced by ancient organisms preserved in these sediments. From these geochemical analyses, Jared is reconstructing polar temperatures in the past when Earth's climate was much warmer than today, as a potential analogue for a future warmer world.