Garrison Loope: I really like Mountains

An Interview with PhD Student Garrison Loope.

Garrison Loope poses for a photo in a cave.
Image Source: http://www.carson.arizona.edu/garrison-loope  

Garrison Loope is one of the graduate students we have been working with. He is a PhD student at University of Arizona, in the Department of Geosciences. As a paleoclimatologist, Loope uses lake sediment, ice cores, tree rings and cave formations to study climate variability and paleodroughts in Southwest Asian Monsoon regions over the last 1000-2000 years. He is also a Carson Scholar- Freshwater fellow, a Paul S. Martin Scholar '14  and an alumni of Oberlin College and Penn State University. I recently interviewed him to get his thoughts on scientific research, climate change and graduate school.

**This interview script has been edited for length and clarity, just a little bit.**

1. Can you tell me a little about yourself? Maybe your area of study or research interests, and hometown?

Garrison Loope: I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska and my family was largely focused on sciences. So I ended up doing Geology and Biology as an undergrad at Oberlin College.Then I did Masters in Geosciences at Penn State, so I have worked on a lot of deep-time paleoclimate issues. My undergraduate thesis was on the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum , which is this amazing event which happened about 55 million years ago. My Masters was on the Permian Mass Extinction which also had massive releases of carbon into the atmosphere and ocean acidification. Both of these events are often talked about as analogs for modern climate change, and so when I got to PhD I realised it was really difficult to get data from 250 million years ago but it’s a lot easier to get data from about 1000 years ago and ended up starting a PhD here, working on climate of the last thousand years.

2. What led you to pursue geosciences at a graduate level and why did you choose U of A?

G: Most people typically do a PhD that’s somewhat related to their Masters and I am a bit different in that I decided to move states and move disciplines. There weren’t really a lot of skills that are applicable to studying the Permian Mass Extinction and climate of the last thousand years. I decided that I wanted to make my research as relevant as possible. Paleoclimate is a discipline that’s somewhat more relevant to modern issues like climate change.

I moved to Arizona specifically because I really like mountains. My personal happiness largely relates to being able to spend time outside exploring. I only applied to grad school in places I really wanted to live, where I could go hiking, explore mountains and canyons.

3. What is your research about?

Oh! That’s a dangerous question. The grand hypothesis when I started was that, there is this big problem with climate change models, they’re missing something and we can see that by looking at the paleoclimate record. So what my advisor and I, as well as many others, thought was happening was that there is decadal-scale variability with climate. Climate models don’t really predict that. The natural variability in a climate change model stays close to the mean while in a paleoclimate record, like a sediment record, you’ll notice that it has decadal and longer variability. This is a concern because we want our models to be able to predict changes somewhat accurately. So when I started my PhD, we were trying to figure out if these megadroughts that we’ve seen in the past are real and if they are real why climate models don’t predict them. Since then, most of my dissertation is attacking that hypothesis. I think that paleoclimate records are wrong. There are different aspects of our records that we don’t really understand. For instance, they (paleoclimate records) exaggerate the decadal to multi-decadal variability, while kind of dampening the inter-annual variability.  Anyway, I no longer think that climate models are horribly wrong. We are, however, likely to experience mega-droughts, but only because of climate change. I am focused on variability in general and I guess I’m also focused on trying to understand the nitty-gritty details of lake sediments, ice cores, tree rings, corals and caves.

4. You were talking about decadal and multi-decadal variabilities, if you were to actually adjust for that in a climate change model, how would you go about doing that?

Well you would do that if the model was wrong and I don’t think it is. But climate model programmers are trying to balance all these different things.There’s all sorts of things you can add into climate models that will change different aspects of it. It’s not always intuitive what will happen when you change different aspects. It’s hard to say, but we are always changing different things with the models so that they fit observations very well. Getting El Nino right is very important, because it’s the most important climate variability that we see on a regular basis, so making sure the model gets that right is important. You just keep tweaking things until it fits the observational records as well as possible, and we thought this (decadal variabilities) was something that needed to be tweaked but I am not so sure anymore.

5. What have been the challenges at this point? Have you had any second thoughts or fears about graduate school?

I think that all graduate students have a lot of second, third and fourth thoughts. Lots of fears. One of the most challenging things about being a graduate student is that you have to set your own course, in terms of questions you want to answer and how you want to answer. I feel like I started off my PhD with a general idea of which way to go, since then I’ve changed directions many different times. The underlying hypothesis that we *cue UA Paleoclimate gang: Jonathan Overpeck, Luke Parsons and Nicollette Buckle-Mitchell* were trying to find evidence for, I think it’s totally wrong but that doesn’t mean the science isn’t interesting still. I have ups and downs in terms of continuing with sciences but in general it’s mostly up. Job prospects for post-graduates aren’t really great, so it’s difficult for me to talk to young aspiring graduate students. There is just not as much jobs out there for paleoclimatologists who want to continue research but there is all sorts of different things you can use climate data for that are not necessarily related to what I do.

6. What kinds of things can you do with climate data?

There is a lot of need for people who know how to manipulate climate data for reinsurance. Insurance companies or agencies want to know things like the likelihood of natural disasters happening. It’s like the equivalent of going to work for an oil company, but for climate scientists instead of geologists.You also hear about climate adaption, that means that there is people who are trying to prepare for climate change. Which is very important for agriculture and water management. These are people who want to make long term plans to deal with climate change and so they’re looking for specialists who can manipulate climate data. There is also a whole range of government agencies who use climate data, like EPA,USGS, NOAA etc.

7. Are you looking to continue doing research after you’re done with your PhD?

I am looking to apply for post-docs after I finish my PhD, I have a year or so left. I would have to apply for grants and fellowships to continue with my post-doc. It’s tough *solemn face*, 20 or maybe 15% of the applications get funding. There is not a lot of funding out there for postdocs. One of the challenges is that we don’t have a lot of say choosing location.

8. And what has been the successes and the greatest lessons you’ve gained from doing research?

I have four projects that I am working on right now and every week my enthusiasm for one of them will rise while for the others it might fall. I am excited that a couple of them will be of broad interest to the paleoclimate community and I am happy that my research hopefully will produce something of interest. In terms of skills that I have learnt, I started off my PhD with very little statistical background, computer programming languages and I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to program in Matlab and how to analyse data-sets. So I feel like that’s something that took a long time for me to learn but is very useful. I feel empowered in ways that I can ask questions about what’s happening with climate and I can answer them. These tools that I use are translatable if I want to work on a different subject that’s somewhat related to climate science.

9. What excites you most about your research?

I like asking questions and trying to figure out answers. That often gets me really distracted pretty easily because writing it afterwards takes a while. I really enjoy coming up with new ideas and trying to test them, that’s why I spend most of my time programming scripts and trying to see if my ideas will work out. That’s what I like about science.

10. Jared: What are your thoughts or feelings on charcoal analysis?

I think charcoal analysis can be very useful as a paleoclimate indicator and yeah! It’s not always straightforward as to how to interpret it. It can have something to do with climate or human activity in a region. Either way it provides useful information that can help tell a story about what was happening in an area.

11. You weren’t around for the first few weeks at the beginning of the summer. What were you up to?

I was just playing hookie *giggles* I was in Colorado, working at the National Center of Atmospheric Research. My advisor and I have some colleagues who work there and it’s nice to talk to them in person rather than on the phone.I spent my time there doing pretty much the same stuff I usually do, making figures, talking about science, bouncing ideas off of them. It’s nice to talk science with people. Luke and I used to spend a lot of time chitchatting about ideas and even though he wasn’t my advisor he filled the niche pretty well. Now that he is gone and Nicollette is busy all the time, I need someone to talk to about science.

*The interviewer thinks the subject is feeling a little nostalgic and starting to miss recent PhD graduate and close friend Luke Parsons.*

12. What’s the most interesting trip you’ve taken and what’s the worst or funniest thing that has happened to you on the field?

I once spent two and a half months camped on a beach in the Galapagos, monitoring giant tortoises for a project. It was awesome but not really related to what I’m doing now. For my PhD all my field work has been in Nepal, sourcing sediment from lakes up in the mountains and down below. The samples you’re working with *cue sediment core JHU-L2*  are from the very bottom of the Himalayas and by the end of the summer you’ll have worked your way all the way to the top of the Himalayas. Getting the cores was a lot of work but also a lot of fun. I really like travelling and getting to see the world. I got a chance to see the biggest mountain range in the world, which is pretty cool.

13. Can you tell us a little bit about the time you biked across the country on your own?

When I was living in Pennsylvania I really wanted to get out west and see mountains. So I spent my last semester of my Masters planning a bike trip across the western US and Canada. By the time I finished my Masters, I had a list of all the places I wanted to tour but didn’t want a car, so I connected them all on a bike tour. I took off on July and biked through Canada, down to Seattle all the way to San Diego. It took me 4 months and I did a little over 4 000 miles, with lot of hiking along the way and stopping to see friends too. It was a nice way to take some time off and I would like to do more walking and biking.

*Thank you for talking to us about your research and science in general Garrison!

Kopo.