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| Robert B. Dunbar, PhD |
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Professor of Geological and Environmental Sciences; FSI Senior Fellow by courtesy
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ADDRESS |
dunbar@pangea.stanford.edu
(650) 725-6830 (phone)
(650) 725-0979 (fax)
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Bldg 320/Braun Hall
Room 325
Stanford, CA 94305
Mail Code:2215 |
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RESEARCH INTERESTS |
| Ocean processes, biogeochemistry, climatology/paleoclimatology, geology/geophysics of continental margins |
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Dunbar's research interests link oceanography, climate dynamics, and geochemistry. His research group works on topics related to global environmental change, with a focus on the coastal ocean, air-sea interactions, and polar processes. He is also engaged in interdisciplinary studies of global change in collaboration with environmental scientists, economists, lawyers, and policy specialists. In October, 2001, Dunbar became the first director of a new Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Resources. In January, 2003, he was appointed the Victoria P. and Roger W. Sant Director of the Earth Systems Program, the largest undergraduate and co-terminal masters program in the School of Earth Sciences.
In his GES labs, he is currently working on two projects in Antarctica to assess the impacts of climate change on Southern Ocean ecosystems and C-system chemistry. Much of this work focuses on the Ross Sea and East Antarctica where Dunbar is studying the modern uptake of carbon dioxide by the ocean. He is also using sediment cores from fjords and shelf basins of East Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula to study past changes in the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Dunbar also specialize in studies of air-sea interactions within the tropics during the past 100 to 12,000 years. His most productive archives for this work are massive reef corals and lake sediments. He is using chemical, isotopic, and morphological measurements of these materials to investigate past climate variability in the very important but poorly studied warmer parts of our planet. Current field areas include the Galápagos Islands, the Republic of Kiribati, Kenya, Easter Island, Chile, Sumatra, and Lake Titicaca, Bolivia. Many of the results deal with the long-term history of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomena, its interactions with the Indian Monsoon, and its impacts on North American Climate.
With funding from the Bio-X initiative at Stanford he has instrumented a coral reef tract in Israel to directly measure C system transformations related to net community production/respiration and calcification/dissolution. He hopes that the work will allow the eventual assessment of anthropogenic impacts in reef systems and the role that coral reefs may play in accelerating or attenuating the effects of the current industrial CO2 transient.
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STANFORD DEPARTMENT |
OTHER AFFILIATIONS |
| Geological and Environmental Sciences |
Director of Earth Systems Program and Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources |
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Only the 5 most recent displayed. View the complete list of publications.
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