Perspectives on My Career in Organic Geochemistry

Abstract

I have had the pleasure of studying the organic geochemistry of sediments of lakes and oceans for 50 years. I have especially enjoyed the versatility of organic geochemistry; it can be applied to studies of many kinds of geological sequences and parts of geological time. As an important part of my career, I sailed as a shipboard organic geochemist on seven ocean‐drilling cruises that recovered organic carbon‐rich Cretaceous black shales, Mediterranean sapropels, and upwelling zone sediments. Because most marine sediments contain less than one‐tenth of a percent of organic carbon, learning more about the properties and the paleoceanographic processes important to the formation of these carbon‐rich deep‐sea sequences has been a long‐term theme of my career. At the same time, I have studied organic geochemical records in lakes, where higher sedimentation rates and greater organic carbon concentrations enable higher resolution investigation of depositional processes than in the oceans. In addition, I have studied peat sequences, which provide relatively detailed records of the paleoclimatic histories of their locations. In summary, my scientific curiosity has permitted me to be a paleoceanographer, a paleolimnologist, a paleoclimatologist, and above all an organic geochemist.