Chris Lowery’s research in micropaleontology and paleoceanography is innovative, flourishing and diversifying and has garnered national and international attention. His underlying focus is on how the oceans have changed over the past ~100 million years, the response of marine life to those changes, and what that can tell us about how the oceans and ocean life are changing today. For an early-career scientist, Lowery has investigated a broad plethora of topics, including Miocene sea level change of the Marion Plateau, the northeast Australian margin, the paleoceanography of the Late Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway of North America, Cenozoic paleoceanography of the South Atlantic, Holocene sea level history of the Texas continental shelf, and the history of the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico.

Lowery has made major discoveries on the dynamics of marine plankton and planktic foraminiferal evolution, in particular, including the aftermath of the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary impact event. His landmark work evolved out of his participation in Expedition 364 to the Chicxulub impact crater at the northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula. Here Lowery led the detailed investigations of the end Cretaceous mass extinction and its aftermath. His work in the crater showed that calcareous plankton reappeared far sooner after the impact than expected in a harsh environment, a sign of the resilience of these organisms. More recently, Lowery and his group have investigated the mechanics of plankton ecological change in response to late Cenozoic cooling by analyzing large International Ocean Discovery Program-centered databases using innovative quantitative techniques. This work has showed that foraminiferal groups shifted their latitudinal ranges toward warmer waters, allowing these organisms to continue to thrive under harsh glacial climates.

Overall, the paleoclimate archives investigated by Lowery, his students and collaborators help us understand what parts of the biosphere are the most threatened by modern climate change and thus provide valuable insights on how best to protect them.

—Timothy Bralower
Pennsylvania State University
University Park, Pennsylvania