When photographer Jasmin Shah found herself in Oxford, we saw a rare opportunity to stop by and visit Changelings members on the campus of Oxford University. The Changelings' mission is to pool their collective vision and their interdisciplinary resources to help answer the most challenging questions about abrupt climate change; to catalyze new research and field work in basic science by leveraging paleoclimate insights to inform and guide current climate science, and to empower and mentor the next generation of climate scientists.

Gideon Henderson

Gideon Henderson, Professor of Earth Sciences at Oxford University, is a geochemist researching climate change and the carbon cycle through the study of oceanography and the palaeoenvironment. He is also working as the Chief Scientific Advisor for the U.K. Government's Department of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra). Gideon is a member of The Changelings,

Gideon Henderson in front of Rhodes House at Oxford University, February 2024.

Ros Rickaby on the roof deck of the Earth Science building at Oxford University, February 2024.

Ros Rickaby

Ros Rickaby is the Chair of Geology, at Oxford University who is fascinated by the jigsaw of complex interactions between the evolution of organisms, ocean chemistry, atmospheric composition and Earth’s climate. Ros is also a member of The Changelings.

Gideon Henderson, Professor of Earth Sciences, explains the stalagmite he is holding is from a cave in the Anti-Atlas on the northern edge of the Sahara in Morocco. We worked on it as part of a project to reconstruct the history of the desert. If there are stals present there must have been water to form them. The bigger pits on the sample are places we took samples for uranium-thorium dating. That tells us the age of the sample, so tells us the times in the past when this part of the world (which is presently very dry) last had significant rainfall. The trench down the middle of the sample is where we took multiple adjacent samples so we could measure trace elements and oxygen isotopes. These enable us to learn something about the amount of rain and where the moisture might have come from in the past. We’ve not yet published on this sample, but it is a project that involved Chris Day - someone working with me who has had the pleasure of attending the Comer meeting in the past.

Ros Rickaby working in the culture media prep lab. She is a biogeochemist aiming to understand the feedbacks between phytoplankton and the carbon cycle involving the use of culture experiments of marine algae.

Postdoctoral Research Assistants Samuel Barton and Krisztina Sarkozi in a lab at the Earth Science building at Oxford University.

Water samples from 40oS in the Atlantic ocean, taken during a GEOTRACES cruise that travelled from Cape Town to Montevideo, measuring ocean chemistry and seeking to understand how the metals that ocean life need are provided in the middle of the ocean.

Marine algal cultures growing in incubators of the Oceanbug group laboratory, Oxford University.

Ros Rickaby, Chair of Geology and Gideon Henderson, Professor of Earth Sciences, with Arianwen Herbert
DPhil student at Oxford University.