Roger Cameron Creel

How do Earth's ice sheets behave during warm periods like the Holocene (~11.7 thousand years ago to present) and Last Interglacial (~130 - 116 ka)? Can understanding that behavor help us place climate warming due to human activities in the context of natural climate variability? How can we merge observations of past sea-level change with physics-based models to tackle these questions?

How does sea level interact with permafrost coastlines over glacial cycles, and what imprints has that interaction left on the landscape? Can we use traces of past sea level preserved in permafrost to gain insights about past ice extent? What affect does permafrost have on past and future ice sheet stability?

What can the patterns of relative sea level in the Arctic tell us about solid Earth structure in Norway, Northern Europe, and across the Arctic? How can we best employ sea-level data to constrain Eurasian and Laurentide Ice Sheet volume and extent over the last two glacial cycles, and what information can sea-level give us about human land-use patterns in the archeological record?

How can we employ the classical formulations of Inverse Theory in paleoclimate contexts to solve practical questions? For instance, where would more observations would most improve existing models? When should we use differences between data rather than the data themselves? How can we extract quantitative information from indirect data sources like moraines to in order to constrain ice volume?

How did ice sheets survive during times in Earth's history when atmospheric CO2 concentrations exceeded present levels by an order of magnitude? What can the rock record tell us about sea surface temperatures, relative and global mean sea level, and ice sheet dynamics in times older than the oldest ocean sediment?