Prof. David McGee

Professor McGee seeks to understand how Earth’s climate evolves over time. Through a range of collaborative projects, his group examines the ways that rainfall patterns, winds, permafrost, and other parts of the Earth system have responded to natural climate changes in the past, and we use these records of past changes to benchmark the models and theories used to project the future.

To reconstruct the history of Earth’s climate, McGee looks for geochemical evidence of past conditions preserved in stalagmites, lake deposits, and deep-sea sediments through careful field observations, precise dating using uranium and its daughter isotopes, geochemical data, and comparisons with climate model outputs and modern climate data.

McGee's current and past work studying paleoclimate has explored the history of the Sahara Desert, the rise and fall of large lakes in the western U.S., shifts in the tropical rainbelt, and changes in high-latitude temperatures and permafrost during Earth’s past warm intervals.

Topics Professor McGee investigates are:
(*) The response of tropical rainfall to past climate changes
(*) Dust as a tracer of past winds
(*) Water availability in drylands
(*) Permafrost stability in past warm climates