Today my new seminar course Cenozoic Paleoclimate begins! We'll be traveling through time(scale) from the PETM to ENSO reading foundational and state-of-the-art papers. Students will lead discussions and develop a project proposal to fill a knowledge gap 💡 Ooo goodness, I'm excited. @au.dk

Talked about Zachos et al 2001, Westerhold et al 2020, and CenCO2PIP 2023 today. A lot? Yes. Very exciting and fun imho? Also yes. This was a Cenozoic overview to kick us off. On to the PETM next week! 🧊🥵

Over the past few weeks, we've traveled millions of years through time past the EOT, MMCO, and MPWP (students LOVE acronyms... not) with highlights from Goldner, Holbourn, Foster, Wara, Fedorov, Burls, and more. Next, we transition to the glacial-interglacial world of the Quaternary! 🧊🌍 #LR04

After delving into the 57-record-stack of LR04 and more, we took a little journey through time over nearly 50 years from Hays, Imbrie, and Shackleton (1976) to the new Barker et al. (2025) on distinct roles for precession, obliquity, and eccentricity the 100-kyr world. 🌐 Literally so exciting.

In the last few weeks, we’ve gone deeper into triggers, processes, and responses of the Pleistocene, with lessons from the MPT (including a lovely virtual visit from @jfarmersalmanac.bsky.social!) and the ice core records. A highlight for me was stepping through the logic of Shakun et al 2012 🙌🏻

It was a beautiful day today at @au.dk, so we took our paper discussion outside ☀️ We’ve transitioned now to the tropics to learn about sapropels, monsoons, landscape feedbacks, threshold responses, and more! 🌱 I try not to pick favorites, but my excitement was hard to hide 🌍

And that's a wrap! We finished up Cenozoic Paleoclimate in the last millennium with @kimcobb.bsky.social's coral records and @michaelemann.bsky.social's temperature compilations 📈 It is inspirational to see paleoclimatologists be politically active, standing up for what the data show. #receipts 🌡️

This semester, the students have been performing one big 'literature review', and will now put their new skills in identifying knowledge gaps to the test by writing and defending a grant proposal. They did a 'pitch session' with their classmates, sent the 'program manager' (me) a 'one-pager', ...