Jennifer Middleton
Columbia University, NY·Earth & Environmental Science
What controls where natural radioactive and noble-gas tracers end up in the ocean, and what can those tracers reveal about Earth's past? Rare isotopes and gases dissolved in seawater, or buried in seafloor mud and ancient ice, record how water moves, how particles sink, and how much cosmic radiation reached Earth.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Chemistry
Astronomy & Astrophysics
- Topics
beryllium-10
10Be/9Be
cosmogenic isotopes
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Aug 2031
What they work on
- Test whether settling particles, rather than ocean circulation, mainly control beryllium-10 (a cosmic-ray-made radioactive isotope) in the South Pacific, using co-located seawater, particle and sediment samples from GEOTRACES GP16 and GP17-OCE.
- Measure how far scavenging near ocean margins, where particles strip beryllium from seawater, shapes basin-wide beryllium-10 inventories and seafloor burial rates, to refine interpretation of sedimentary 10Be/9Be records.
- Trace pathways of hydrothermal vent water across the South Pacific with helium-3 and noble gas measurements, and estimate fluxes and removal rates of vent-derived trace elements and isotopes.
- Quantify snow and sea-ice melt inputs in the Amundsen Sea and their link to iron, using all five noble gases, water stable isotopes and tritium, and follow meltwater spreading toward the open Southern Ocean.
- Develop cosmogenic isotope records from marine sediments and ice up to about 7 million years old to test whether the Sun's crossings of cold galactic clouds increased radiation reaching Earth.
More about the research
The projects use these chemical fingerprints to study the South Pacific and Southern Ocean today, and to reconstruct Earth's environment over millions of years.
Why it matters
Knowing what controls beryllium-10 and other tracers lets scientists read sediment and ice records of past ocean and climate change more reliably. Tracing hydrothermal iron and glacial meltwater in the Southern Ocean clarifies what feeds marine productivity near Antarctica as ice shelves change. The COSMIC work could show whether the Sun's path through the galaxy has acted as an outside driver of Earth's history, informing studies of how habitable Earth-like planets can be.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: GCR: Center on Solar Wind-Milky Way Impacts on Complex Earth Systems (COSMIC)
NSF · Sep 2026 – Aug 2031
What drives spatial variability in water-column beryllium-10 inventories?
NSF · Feb 2026 – Jan 2029
Collaborative Research: US GEOTRACES GP17-OCE and GP17-ANT: Properties and processes impacting other trace element and isotope cycles using noble gas and stable isotope tracers
NSF · Aug 2022 – Jul 2027
Closest labs
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University of California-Santa Cruz, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Characterize zooplankton communities along the central and western Aleutian Islands at sites with known differences in mercury levels in marine life, combining oceanography and genomics.
Virginia Harvey
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Earth & Environmental Science
Determine whether the Sun's crossings of cold galactic clouds compressed the heliosphere and altered Earth's radiation, atmosphere and temperature, using astrophysical, heliospheric and whole-atmosphere simulations.
Gregory Cutter
Old Dominion University, VA·Earth & Environmental Science
Quantify the total inventory of dissolved organic sulfur (DOS), trace carbon-bound sulfur compounds, across the Pacific Ocean using archived samples from over 100 sites between Alaska and Antarctica.
The school
Columbia University: 89 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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