Elena started her PhD at the Carbonate Clumped Isotope group led by Martin Ziegler in March of 2025. Together with Martin and her promotor Lucas Lourens she is aiming to improve ocean temperature reconstructions of the past 5 million years using clumped isotopes, a project that is part of the EU Horizon Past To Future consortium.
The Plio-Pleistocene (5.3 million years ago to ~12.000 years ago) is a fascinating interval in Earth's climatic history that featured a 400ppm CO2 world often referred to as a semi-analogue of future climate, the onset (or perhaps only intensification?) of glaciations over the Northern Hemisphere, and the establishment of “modern” Ice Ages following the Mid-Pleistocene transition. These changes essentially reflect the bumpy road followed by Earth's most recent climates: from a warmer than present state all the way to the familiar bipolar world of today, with its stronger zonal and meridional gradients and a relatively de-stratified Southern Ocean. A road we are currently reversing.
Elena is particularly interested in understanding what the varying contributions of bottom water temperature and global ice volume to benthic oxygen isotopes were across this time and what this meant for the evolution of global surface climate, Earth System sensitivity, and ice-sheet (in)stability. An ideal tool to approach these questions is clumped isotope thermometry from benthic foraminifera, which is great because she loves working at UU's Stable Isotopes lab! Some of her other ongoing/upcoming projects also involve Pliocene surface temperature reconstructions using planktic foram Mg/Ca-clumped, and clumped isotope calibrations.
In Spring of 2025 she was lucky enough to participate in the Breaking Science competition and to receive the first prize. Here's the (low quality) clip of the pitch which attempts to describe the overarching goals of "Past To Future".
And here's a gorgeous Amphistegina lessonii to brighten up your day :) Cultured at NIOZ and later measured for clumped with the goal of further constraining foram calibrations.
