Robert Rohde

Robert Andrew Rohde is a former graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied under Richard A. Muller. He received his PhD in 2010 with a thesis entitled "The Development and Use of the Berkeley Fluorescence Spectrometer to Characterize Microbial Content and Detect Volcanic Ash in Glacial Ice."[1] He has recently attracted media attention because of his role in the Berkeley Earth project (also known as "BEST") as the lead scientist,[2] and was responsible for writing software that searched databases for global temperature records, compiled the records, and merged them into a global temperature record, a task that Muller compared to "Hercules's enormous task of cleaning the Augean stables."[3] With regard to Rohde's role in BEST, Muller also said that Rohde was responsible for extending the temperature record determined by the project back to 1753.[4]

Pre-BEST career

While a grad student, Rohde and Muller published a letter to Nature on the topic of mass extinctions throughout Earth's history. Rohde et al. found that such extinctions occur surprisingly regularly, about every 62 million years.[5][6] During this time, he also published two papers regarding microbial metabolism in ice crystals.[7][8] This research, which showed that microbes can survive in such conditions for up to 100,000 years, was reported on by New Scientist at the time of its publication.[9]

References

  1. ↑ Rohde, Robert A. (2010). "The Development and Use of the Berkeley Fluorescence Spectrometer to Characterize Microbial Content and Detect Volcanic Ash in Glacial Ice" (Electronic Thesis or Dissertation). University of California, Berkeley.
  2. ↑ Knight, Matthew (21 October 2011). "New climate study deals blow to skeptics". CNN. Retrieved 30 January 2014.
  3. ↑ Sample, Ian (27 February 2011). "Can a group of scientists in California end the war on climate change?". The Guardian. Retrieved 30 January 2014.
  4. ↑ Flatow, Ira (3 August 2012). "Changing Views About A Changing Climate". NPR. Retrieved 30 January 2014. It came as a bigger surprise over the last three to six months when our young scientist Robert Rohde was able to adopt really excellent statistical methods and push the record back to 1753.
  5. ↑ Perlman, David (10 March 2005). "Mass extinction comes every 62 million years, UC physicists discover". SFGate. Retrieved 30 January 2014.
  6. ↑ Rohde, R.; Muller, R. (2005). "Cycles in fossil diversity". Nature. 434 (7030): 208–210. Bibcode:2005Natur.434..208R. doi:10.1038/nature03339. PMID 15758998.
  7. ↑ Rohde, R. A.; Price, P. B.; Bay, R. C.; Bramall, N. E. (2008). "In situ microbial metabolism as a cause of gas anomalies in ice". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 105 (25): 8667. Bibcode:2008PNAS..105.8667R. doi:10.1073/pnas.0803763105.
  8. ↑ Rohde, R. A.; Price, P. B. (2007). "Diffusion-controlled metabolism for long-term survival of single isolated microorganisms trapped within ice crystals". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 104 (42): 16592. Bibcode:2007PNAS..10416592R. doi:10.1073/pnas.0708183104.
  9. ↑ "Microbes can survive deep freeze for 100,000 years". New Scientist. 13 October 2007. Retrieved 30 January 2014.
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