PhD Student
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
mamwood@ucsc.edu
Research interests: paleoclimate, paleoceanography, isotope geochemistry
Biography
I grew up in a small farming town in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. I attended the University of New Hampshire for my undergraduate degree, initially with a major in chemical engineering. I was lucky enough to participate in a Fulbright UK Summer Institute in Exeter, UK after my freshman year, where I studied global climate change and was introduced for the first time to paleoclimatology and geochemistry. That experience guided me toward a new major of Earth sciences, declared in my junior year at UNH, and ultimately to graduate school! My undergraduate research, broadly motivated by interests in the climate system and the impacts of climate change on the environment, focused on the cycling of mercury in wetland ecosystems in New Hampshire. I also spent a summer at Northwestern University, working in Dr. Andrew Jacobson’s lab to characterize the geochemistry of zeolite minerals as part of a project on chemical weathering. After completing my bachelor’s degree, I joined the Paytan Lab at UCSC as a PhD student in Earth and Planetary Sciences in 2019. I am principally advised by Dr. Adina Paytan and co-advised by Dr. Mathis Hain.
Research
My research aims to reconstruct strontium (Sr) isotopes in seawater over the past one million years. Fluctuations in the isotopic composition of seawater Sr reflect changes in large-scale processes related to the climate system, such as continental weathering and carbonate burial. I’m interested in how the rates of these processes may have changed over glacial-interglacial cycles. Glacial-interglacial periods are times of dramatic changes in Earth’s climate, yet we don’t fully understand how these changes drove the observed imbalance in modern marine geochemical budgets (e.g. Sr). I want to investigate how global weathering may have responded to or driven climate variation, as well as how global carbonate burial in shallow and deep-sea environments may have changed over glacial cycles. Ultimately, characterizing these carbon cycle fluxes can help us understand the forcing mechanisms and feedbacks that operate in the Earth’s climate system. I use marine barite, a mineral that precipitates in seawater, to reconstruct seawater chemistry over the Quaternary Period and investigate these questions.
Teaching
Outreach and mentoring are very important to me, and I am always working to develop effective, inclusive teaching practices. I have served as a GEOPATHS peer mentor, a GEOACE facilitator, and have led many outreach activities for K-12 students.
Check out these review slides on the principles of scientific writing I created with my students in our GEOACE Writing Sessions.