Rate My Professor Erin McClymont

Professor Erin McClymont is Professor of Physical Geography in the Department of Geography at Durham University. Her research focuses on investigating the patterns and processes affecting climate and environmental changes in the past. She specializes in Quaternary environmental change, palaeoceanography, palaeoclimate, organic geochemistry using biomarkers, marine ecosystems, land-ocean interactions, and ocean-ice sheet interactions. McClymont analyzes marine, lake, and peat sequences to understand climate changes recorded in oceans and on land over timescales from decades to millions of years. She explores connections between low- and high-latitude climate systems responsible for global climate change. Employing biomarker proxies, she reconstructs past changes in ocean and lake temperature, hydrology, vegetation, and predator diets. Current projects include reconstructing Antarctic sea ice environments from the last glacial period to the present day (the last 40,000 years), sea surface temperatures from the Pliocene to the present day (the last 5 million years), and testing new organic geochemistry biomarker proxies for past environmental change. She leads the ANTSIE project, funded by the European Research Council and Leverhulme Trust, reconstructing Antarctic sea ice using seabird archives.

McClymont received the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2013 in recognition of her research profile. She is a member of the NERC Peer Review College, serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Quaternary Science, and is Editor for the EGU Journal Climate of the Past. She led the international PlioVAR working group synthesizing and integrating globally distributed climate records from the Pliocene epoch approximately 3-5 million years ago. Her research has tested climate models against real-world data, contributing to the most recent IPCC report, and examines the sensitivity and resilience of Antarctic ecosystems to change. Key publications include 'Ocean heat forced West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreat after the Last Glacial Maximum' (Nature Communications, 2026), 'Mid-Holocene sea-ice dynamics and climate in the northeastern Weddell Sea inferred from an Antarctic snow petrel stomach oil deposit' (Climate of the Past, 2025), 'The foraging distribution and habitat use of chick-rearing snow petrels from two colonies in Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica' (Marine Biology, 2025), and highly cited earlier works such as 'Introducing global peat-specific temperature and pH calibrations based on brGDGT bacterial lipids' (2017).