Also visit our Rwenzori Science website about this project!

East Africa

I am part of a collaborative project determining aimed at understanding past climate conditions in tropical east Africa.  We are focused on reconstructing past temperatures using two independent methods: 1) past glacial extents and fluctuations combined with glacier modeling and 2) organic remains (branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (brGDGTs) in lake sediments.  We have conducted extensive research in the Rwenzori Mountains in Uganda, where we can apply and compare both methods.  Our results thus far are published in these papers: Kelly et al., 2014, Loomis et al., 2017, Jackson et al., 2019, Jackson et al., 2020, Doughty et al., 2020 and Vickers et al., 2021.

My collaborators on this project are Alice Doughty (University of Maine), Bob Nakileza (Makerere University), James Russell (Brown University), Susan Zimmerman (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) and graduate students at our respective institutions.

Funding for this research is from the National Science Foundation (EAR-122705; EAR-1702319), The Comer Family Foundation, National Geographic Society (8886-11) and Dartmouth College.