Jess Adkins is a chemical oceanographer interested in using trace metals as tracers of environmental processes.  Most of his current work is centered around the geochemical investigation of past climates.  He is primarily concerned with the last few glacial/interglacial cycles that span a few hundred thousand years.  It is in this time range that he had both a relatively accurate and precise understanding of age models (though they are always improving) together with large climatic shifts that require mechanistic explanation.  In particular, he had an amazing record of the rapidity and magnitude of climate change from polar ice cores.  The figure below shows the record of oxygen isotope variation, a proxy for air temperature, at the Greenland Summit over the past 110,000 years.  The last 10,000 years, the Holocene, is marked by relative climatic stability when compared to the preceding glacial period where there are large and very fast transitions between cold and warm times.  As an oceanographer, Jess tries to understand the coupled ocean/atmosphere system during these shifts by monitoring the deep ocean's behavior.  Much of his work to date has focused on developing a new climate archive, deep-sea corals, that has the potential to revolutionize the types of information we can obtain about oceanographic climate change.