Over the last 4,000 years, SW Asia has been home to some of the earliest agricultural economies, urban centers and empires. However, palaeoclimate is often overlooked as a factor potentially swerving the course of history. Decadal to multi-decadal variations in rainfall are impactful to Middle Eastern societies; a region where water can often become scarce. Instrumental records are generally too short to capture the full range of rainfall variability and do not place recent rainfall anomalies into a meaningful historical context. Such information must come from archives such as tree rings, lake sediments, historical documents and speleothems.

With a lack of high-resolution data regionally, the aim of my PhD project is to produce precisely dated speleothem records for rainfall throughout SW Asia (e.g. Turkey, Iraq, Oman, Yemen) to help confront and resolve this dichotomy. Working closely with historians, archeologists and fellow palaeoclimatologists/cavers, key samples will be investigated here at the University of Basel through our state-of-the-art speleothem research facility.
 

Employment and Education
 

• Nov 2021-Present: PhD student in the Quaternary Geology group under Prof. Dominik Fleitmann, University of Basel, Switzerland.
• Oct 2020 - Oct 2021: MRes (distinction) in speleothem isotope geochemistry, Lancaster University, UK
• 2016-Oct 2020: Quality Coordinator, Greencoat Limited, Monmouth, UK
• 2013: Juneau Icefield Research Program, University of Alaska SE, USA
• 2011-2015: MESci (2:1)in Environmental Geoscience, Cardiff University, UK