Research

Coastal Aquifers

About half of the world population lives in coastal regions and relies in part on groundwater from coastal aquifers. Given the risk of seawater intrusion due to sea level rise and excess pumping, and given the expected shortages in water resources due to population growth and climate changes, it is of cardinal importance to understand mechanisms of groundwater flow in coastal aquifers, including flow rates, and to develop new methodologies to study salt water flow. Studying coastal aquifers is important for practical purposes such as water management, and scientific purposes such as determining ocean elemental budgets through water–rock–ocean interaction.

Paleoclimate

Paleoclimate is one of the tools to understand the potential effects of climate change. While modern observations and model predictions are valuable tools to study climate change, paleoclimate provides a long-term perspective with a wide range of boundary conditions (e.g. radiation and atmospheric CO2). In our group, we focus on reconstructing past climate over the glacial-interglacial cycles (i.e. the past few hundred thousand years). We mainly use the geochemistry of terrestrial records such as lake deposits and loess.