Great Geologists | 135
a mother who taught children with
learning disabilities. She first became
interested in science as a seven-year-
old watching the popular television
show The Undersea World of Jacques
Cousteau. She has said, “When I was
a kid I wanted to be an oceanographer
like Jacques Cousteau. The only time
I drifted away from that goal was in
high school, when I got into geology.”
But as a college student at Brown
University, she discovered a field that
combined oceanography and geology:
paleoclimatology.
Her interest in palaeoclimatology led
her to accept a Ph.D. at Columbia
University researching the initiation of
the great ice sheets in the northern
hemisphere during the Cenozoic. This
was followed by spells at a number of
leading academic institutions including
the University of Melbourne in Australia,
the University of California at Berkeley,
Boston University and MIT, followed by
return to Columbia in 2011.
It was as graduate student of Bill
Ruddiman at Columbia that she rose to
Maureen Raymo in her office at Columbia
University. Image used with her permission.
prominence when they and co-author
Philip Froelich proposed the ‘uplift-
weathering hypothesis’ in 1988. This
established a link between the Late
Eocene uplift of the Himalayas and
Tibetan plateau and the global cooling
trend seen in the Cenozoic. Since the
Late Miocene, uplift rates have been
particularly pronounced, and polar ice
sheets have episodically expanded
The Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London. The medal, awarded to
outstanding geologists, is cast in Palladium, an element discovered by Wollaston.