Reed Scherer’s research has taken him to the planet’s Polar Regions and fundamentally influenced two seemingly distant scientific fields: micropaleontology and glaciology. Both are central to understanding and documenting climate change.
The NIU geologist/paleontologist is a world expert in the study of fossil diatoms—microscopic single-celled algae that live in shallow seawater, evolve rapidly and are deposited on the ocean floor, leaving behind glass-like shells.
Because diatom varieties are linked to water temperature, their presence in sediment cores extracted from the seabed provides a record of ancient ocean temperatures and climates. At Earth’s poles, this record is helping unravel what happened when ice sheets melted in the past—and what could happen in the future.
Not long ago, most scientists believed it would take tens of thousands of years to melt polar ice sheets. This view changed in the 1990s, partly due to research by Scherer, who was a key member of a research team that confirmed the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been unstable in the past and even collapsed, raising sea levels by 18 feet.
“No other researcher has broken so much ground in characterizing how the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have responded to past changes in climate,” says Douglas MacAyeal, a University of Chicago geophysical sciences professor. “Reed’s work is the gold standard.”
Scherer also has played a leadership role in the $30 million Antarctic Geological Drilling program, which is among the largest scientific projects ever conducted in the Antarctic. ANDRILL researchers have recovered geologic records buried beneath the Antarctic sea in order to gain a better understanding of contemporary global warming trends.