I am pleased to report that I am now completely finished with my PhD. You can now call me Doctor Boom. However, although I am first aid trained, I have no medical qualifications, so maybe let’s not worry about using the title for now…
So, 5 years after the whole process started, I can successfully tick off the following:
- I have a fancy printed version of my thesis (the book documenting all the work I did) that sits on a bookshelf and I look at occasionally
- I had a day (graduation) where I dressed up in a multicoloured gown, which was really hot and sweaty
- I got a certificate (my degree) to say well done
- And now, as of last week, all of the work I did has been published in scientific journals (the thesis is too long to publish all together, so it was broken into 3 separate papers)
The third and final instalment of my PhD research to be published came out last week in a journal called Climate of the Past. In it, I do my best to synthesise all I learnt about this time period called the Eocene-Oligocene Transition that occurred 34 million years ago. Super quick recap: scientists are interested in this period of the Earth’s history as it is when the first major Antarctic Ice Sheet appeared; before then Antarctica was very hot and forested.
I have written before (probably in too much boring detail for the average reader) about using climate models to understand this point in the Earth’s history, and how many questions remain in our understanding. Now, I have simply tried to bring together as much information as I can from lots of different sources to try to create a picture with some sort of clarity. I focussed on the high latitude Southern Hemisphere, because that is where a lot of the action was occurring at the time and it is also where models potentially have some difficulties in reproducing the climate.
To do this, I used multiple climate model simulations of the period from two different modelling groups and compared these to the biggest dataset of proxy records of the Earth’s climate 34 million years ago that I could compile by myself. Just reading and compiling all of the data from papers took me around a year. Not solidly, but reading papers solidly is very difficult in my opinion and synthesising all of the different information into something coherent in my head cannot be forced to happen quickly. It comes when it is ready.
In the end for this paper, I generated none of the data myself (what is known as primary data). It is all secondary data, either provided by other researchers I work with or taken from this very slow and lengthy review of scientific literature. Maybe that is not how I had pictured the thesis might look at the start. Maybe the plan was to build up to some exceptional new result that I discovered, with data I produced with my own hands. But that wasn’t the case and, to be honest, I think it is better the way it is. Science is, and should be, a collaborative effort.
Two thirds of my thesis was based on ‘my own’ data, trying out new ideas, messing around with a climate model, seeing if anything revolutionary popped out. This was really important too: for me to grow as a researcher, to learn about how the model works and to try to generate some outside-the-box ideas. Occasionally, of course, something truly revolutionary will be discovered. In the end, however, my conclusion is that model results often lack meaning by themselves: they need observations or proxy records to go with them to provide some sort of truth of what really happened, whether that is outside right now or 34 million years ago.
My new paper finds very similar things about why the Earth changed so much at the Eocene-Oligocene Transition to earlier research carried out nearly 20 years ago. It doesn’t challenge or rewrite everything we know, but that’s okay. The main scientific conclusion from my paper is that incorporating all of this data is actually essential to coming to the same conclusion as the research from many years ago. Without the inclusion of the boring, extensive data review, I might have quickly, excitedly jumped to a different conclusion that, on balance, seems less likely to be correct.
Much like this paper brings together different existing scientific data to compliment research built up over many years, it also brings together my own work and thoughts. It took many years, but it wouldn’t make sense to rush it: the conclusions just take a bit of time, even if all of the data and answers are already out there.
Ezekiel Boom 