Michael Sandstrom
Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
NSF Graduate Research Fellow
Research Interests
My main research interests are in paleoclimatology and geochemistry, particularly as they relate to sea level reconstruction and fluctuations of ice sheet volume from the early Pliocene to the last deglaciation. I am also interested in surficial geomorphology, both for glacier reconstruction and understanding shoreline sequences.
Most of my current activities include absolute dating techniques of shallow water carbonates using strontium isotope stratigraphy and U-series dating. Building upon previous work, I have developed screening methods for detecting diagenesis in fossil coral and bivalve samples through a combination of trace element chemistry, laser ablation, SEM imagery, X-ray diffraction, and strontium isotope leaches. Another notable interest of mine is locating and mapping shorelines correlated with the super-interglacial MIS 31 in order to find constraints on ice volume during the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT) period, which marks the transition from 41 kyr glacial cyclicity to a 100 kyr dominated cyclicity.
