Piecing together a picture of Earth’s climate regulation

Earth’s long-term climate stability emerges from interactions between the atmosphere, oceans, rocks, and life. Our research seeks to identify and better understand the major biogeochemical processes that regulate global carbon cycling and environmental change across Earth history.

We approach these questions using a geochemical toolbox that includes traditional and non-traditional isotope systems, petrography, field observations, laboratory experiments, and numerical modelling techniques. Our work spans a wide range of timescales, from the modern Earth system to the Precambrian, and includes investigations into mass extinction events, greenhouse–icehouse transitions, ocean chemistry evolution, and the co-evolution of microbial life and its environment.

How effective is alkalinity based carbon removal ?

Can Earth systems be engineered to safely and durably remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at climatically meaningful scales?

Our research investigates how alkalinity-based carbon dioxide removal strategies interact with natural environmental systems, with a particular focus on enhanced rock weathering and the long-term fate of weathering-derived alkalinity and cations across soils, rivers, estuaries, and coastal oceans.

We combine field trials, isotope geochemistry, reaction-transport modelling, geospatial analysis, and machine learning approaches to evaluate carbon removal across the full Earth system. Rather than focusing solely on carbon uptake at deployment sites, our work seeks to understand how weathering products are transported, transformed, retained, or removed as they move through interconnected terrestrial and marine environments.

A central theme of this work is determining how open environmental systems influence the permanence and accounting of carbon dioxide removal. Current projects investigate weathering rates, upstream emissions associated with feedstock production, downstream alkalinity losses, and secondary mineral formation processes that may influence long-term carbon storage and environmental response.

Funding

| Marsden | MBIE | NZARI | Rutherford Discovery Fellowship | Ballance Agri-Nutrients |