Dr Joel Pedro

Dr Joel Pedro is the Chief Investigator of the Australian Antarctic Program’s Million Year Ice Core Project (MYIC). The aim of MYIC, in the framework of the International Partnership in Ice Core Sciences (IPICS) oldest ice challenge, is to recover a continuous record of Earth’s climate and atmospheric composition that extends to well over a million years in age. An ice core covering this period will enable us to investigate climate links between temperature and carbon dioxide during the mid-Pleistocene Transition, when the Earth’s ice age cycles changed pacing from 41,000 to 100,000 year periodicity. The project will test competing hypotheses on the cause of this non-linear shift in the Earth’s climate state, with reconstruction of the relative timing and amplitude of glacial cycles beyond 800 kyr and the associated changes in atmospheric composition and biogeochemical markers. Dr Pedro’s previous work has applied paleoclimate observations and modelling approaches to a range of topics in Quaternary climate, carbon cycle and ice sheet dynamics (see link). A particular focus is testing hypotheses on the atmosphere, ocean and cryosphere interactions responsible for past climate transitions.