Guest researcher at Stratigraphy/Paleontology, Utrecht University.

Hemmo Abels applies a combination of stratigraphy and sedimentology on mostly Cenozoic terrestrial sediments to reconstruct past sedimentary environments and climates. Beside paleoclimate reconstructions, he tries to solve fundamental questions regarding allogenic vs autogenic control on sedimentation in lacustrine to fluvial sedimentary environments by investigating the registration of astronomical climate cyclicity in the sedimentary rock record and the impact of transient periods of extreme greenhouse warming.

His current working areas are the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, and Williston Basin, Montana, where fluvial cyclicity and early Eocene hyperthermals are studied. Other projects focus on the paleoenvironmental evolution of Cenozoic central Asia using terrestrial sediments in the Xining Basin (China), Miocene-Pliocene lacustrine evolution of the Denizli Basin, Turkey, within Marie-Curie ITN PRIDE, and sedimentation and cyclicity of the Ypresian in the low countries.

Hemmo is guest-professor at Leuven University (Belgium) and in the Board of the Royal Netherlands Geological and Mining Society (KNGMG) and Foundation of the Netherlands Journal of Geosciences (sNJG).