Post Doc
Research Interests
Paleoceanography, Sr isotope stratigraphy, Pelagic clay, Long-term environmental changes
Biography
I am from a little Japanese town near the Pacific Ocean. During my childhood, I loved the pretty beach with big waves in my town and oceanfront lifestyle. I opted to pursue my career with the ocean, as I understood I could not live without it when I was a senior high student.
I obtained my bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and Ph.D. from School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo. My research topic at the University of Tokyo was clarifying the long-term environmental changes using pelagic clay that was concentrated with rare earth elements in the Pacific Ocean.
For almost two years, I was employed as a postdoc at the Research Institute for Marine Geodynamics (IMG), Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC). My postdoc work focused on Paleogene paleoceanography in the Campbell Plateau, south of New Zealand, by using deep-sea samples from International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP). I also took part in several research cruises that centered on submarine volcanoes in the Izu-Bonin arc.
At the moment, I work at Kochi University’s Marine Core Research Institute, also known as the Kochi Core Center (KCC). The main topic of my research is the paleoceanographic reconstruction across the Gibraltar Strait. I will explore deeper into the subject while I am at UC Santa Cruz.
Research
My research interest is how to reconstruct paleoceanographic records from deep-sea sediments. One of my targets is pelagic clay below the carbonate compensation depth (CCD) in the Pacific Ocean. Dating pelagic clay is difficult due to the barren of calcareous and siliceous microfossils, but it preserves the Cenozoic and sometimes Cretaceous history of the pelagic realm in the Pacific Ocean. I aim to unveil the long-term (>10 million years) oceanic environments during the Cenozoic through my research that improves the dating methods and increases the number of basic geochemical data from the abyssal pelagic cores. The other topic in my research is paleoceanographic changes from the gateway (i.e., Tasman Gateway, Gibraltar Strait) to the pelagic realm using radiogenic isotopes, such as Nd, Sr, and Os isotopes. While they have been applied to the discussion on water mass and isolation of the oceanic basin, higher spatiotemporal resolutions are needed for short-term (<10000 years) paleoceanographic reconstruction. These days, I concentrate on the paleoceanographic reconstruction of the Atlantic-Mediterranean linkage from the Miocene to the Pliocene and the South Pacific Ocean during the Paleogene.