User:Pachypossum/Dorothy Peteet

Dorothy Marie Peteet is a Senior Research Scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) studying biology and paleoenvironments. Peteet is an adjunct professor at Columbia University's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and is the director of the university's paleoecology division of the New Core Lab at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Education
In 1974, Peteet graduated cum laude from Duke University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in botany. She then earned her Masters of Science in biology from New York University in 1979. Continuing her biology education at New York University, Peteet acquired a Doctorate of Philosophy in 1983. From 1983 to 1985, Peteet was a part of the National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship (NRC) with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Research
Peteet has studied multiple areas of paleontology, largely focusing on the Late Pleistocene and the Holocene.

Specific topics include the use of pollen, spores, and plant and animal macrofossils to study vegetational change and human impact. Additonally, Peteet studies carbon sequestration in lakes and wetland by utilizing GISS climate modelers.

Peteet uses her research to create local and regional records of changes in vegetation, climate, and carbon sequestration. These records and the corresponding research can be used to aid in understanding rapid or anthropogenic climate change.

Publications
Peteet has authored or coauthored over 90 scientific papers and journal entries.

Her first paper, "Does the ocean-atomosphere system have more than one stable mode of operation?", was published in Nature in May of 1985. Peteet is cited alongside Wallace S. Broecker and David Rind, writing about how ice cores from Greenland show fluctuating cycles in the production of deep water.

Peteet's most recent work is an abstract submitted to EarthArXiv on June 30, 2023 by the name of "Cosmogenic nuclide dating conundrum for retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet and the critical roles of geomagnetic and heliomagnetic modulation of cosmic ray flux". This work was co-authored by Dennis Kent and Luca Lanci and is awaiting peer review.

A complete list of Peteet's publications can be found here.