Mike Kaplan was heading to the dentist’s office when he received a career-highlight email. “I will always remember where I was,” he says. A research professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which is part of the Columbia Climate School, Kaplan had been chosen for the highly selective Guggenheim fellowship, which “offers fellowships to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship…under the freest possible conditions.”
Kaplan was excited, but also humbled and surprised. “I’m still trying to be in the glow because, unfortunately most of what we do as researchers, we deal with rejections, things not working, dead ends. When something really positive happens like this, it’s nice to just take a step back and appreciate it,” he says.
As a geologist, Kaplan studies the ways ice sheets, mountain glaciers, climates and landscapes changed in the past. His project for the Kayden Guggenheim Fellowship in Climate Studies is similar to the research Kaplan has been conducting with his colleagues at Lamont. In other words, “prior to the 20th century and instrumental records, how have glaciers changed and how has climate changed in terms of natural variability—that is, before humans?” In particular, the fellowship work will focus on the last few thousand years, right before the 20-21st century warming in South America and the Southern Hemisphere, he says. “When you look at the geologic record in places such as South America and try to reconstruct what glaciers and climate did in the past, how is it similar to other places around the globe, such as the Alps or the Western U.S.? How is it different?”
Kaplan developed an interest in glaciers as an undergraduate at SUNY Buffalo. He remembers taking geology classes and becoming enthralled by the topic of geomorphology, or surface processes, such as water, gravity, ice and wind that shape the Earth’s surface. “I started taking classes in geomorphology and climate change, and I got really hooked,” he says. “Then I had the opportunity to go to Greenland for undergraduate research to work on ice cores. It was there I learned about how scientists reconstruct past climate changes.” This was the first time Kaplan ever considered going to graduate school, but he now knew what he wanted to study: the changes in climate that could be detected using ice cores and by evidence that glaciers left on the landscape, including around New York City.
“Glaciers leave a record on the landscape that tells you about past climate changes. That’s what I went to graduate school to focus on and what I’m still doing, along with other research. Much of the work I do now is on small mountain glaciers that are very sensitive to climate changes—they are like bellwethers in the atmosphere—but I think it could be traced back to my undergraduate days,” says Kaplan. Later, as a master’s student at University of Maine and a Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado-Boulder, he also became interested in geochronology, or the science of measuring the numerical age of fossils, rocks and sediments, as well as the rates of geologic processes.
In 2006, Kaplan started at Lamont. Alongside his colleagues there, he remembers the surprise of learning about the differences in glacier behavior across the globe. “When you look at the geologic archive or record, which is what I do, climate wasn’t the same everywhere. There was natural variability in glaciers around the world. Climate change was different in the Southern Hemisphere versus Europe and North America.”
Two decades later, he is still at Lamont working on these complex questions, and Kaplan says “perseverance and persistence” have been essential in guiding his career and research. “I could see early on other students were much smarter than me, in terms of intelligence, but I could see that didn’t necessarily matter. What mattered was hard work and perseverance. To succeed in what we do, persistence, perseverance, following your interests, thinking deeply, and trying to learn and make new discoveries in the field are what’s really important.”
Kaplan feels that the Guggenheim fellowship is a reward that reflects many years—decades—of hard work and perseverance. “I like to see it as a recognition that I’ve contributed scientifically to the disciplines in the Earth sciences that I focus on,” he says.
