Dr. Mea Cook

Dr. Mea Cook, Paleoceanographer. ©WHOI

Paleoceanographer, Mea Cook is a postdoctoral researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  Mea specializes in using chemical analysis of marine sediments to reconstruct past environments.  She uses these observations to understand how and why ice ages rise and fall.  In February, she received her Ph.D. in Marine Geology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography.

With Lloyd Keigwin, her thesis supervisor at WHOI, Mea studied the climate history of the North Pacific region.  Paleoclimate records are difficult to reconstruct in many parts of the Pacific because deep Pacific water is corrosive to the calcium carbonate shells of tiny organisms called foraminifera. Many geochemical indicators of the temperature, salinity and chemistry of seawater are measured from foraminifer shells.  Consequently there is relatively little known about the climate history in the largest ocean basin on Earth.  Using sediment cores collected from the Bering Sea, Mea discovered that during the most recent transition from the last ice age to today's warm climate, the surface- and intermediate-depth water of the North Pacific changed in lock-step with climate in the North Atlantic.

Recently, Mea began work on a project studying marine methane hydrates and their potential role in climate change.  Methane hydrates are ice-like solids composed of water and methane that form in marine sediments near the edges of most continents.  There is a growing body of geochemical evidence that the breakdown of marine methane hydrates may have injected methane into the atmosphere during brief (thousand year) periods of warm climate that occurred during the last ice age fifty- to thirty-thousand years ago. Besides releasing a strong greenhouse gas to the atmosphere, decomposing methane hydrates can cause underwater landslides and tsunamis.  Mea hopes to add to our understanding of what causes methane hydrates to destabilize so we can determine what role they might play in our future climate.

Mea impersonates a queen angelfish. ©WHOI

Mea's introduction to scientific research was in high school as an intern at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C..  Mea won the Virginia State Science Fair with a project on the properties of zeolites, minerals that can be used in electrochemical catalysis.  Having had so much fun with electrochemistry, she entered Princeton University as a chemistry major, but was waylaid when she took a course in geochemistry. She was dazzled by the elegance of using chemistry to understand the history of the solar system, the Earth, and the oceans.  Mea changed her major to Geosciences and did minor in cello and viola da gamba performance.

When she's not coaxing foraminifera to tell their tales, Mea plays chamber music, watches Ingrid Bergman movies, and goes birding.  When she has the chance, she escapes to the West to go backpacking.  Her favorite hikes are up Cascade Canyon in Grand Teton National Park, and around the sand dunes on Mesquite Flats in Death Valley National Park.