Cole A. McCormick, Ph.D.

About Me

Carbonate minerals are the primary archive of past ocean chemistry — the record we use to reconstruct ancient temperatures, redox conditions, and the carbon cycle across billions of years of Earth history. But that archive isn't passive: fluids moving through rock long after it forms can quietly overwrite the very signals we assume it preserves. My research asks a question that sits underneath a large part of paleoclimate and paleoceanography science — how much can we actually trust these geochemical archives, and under what conditions do they fail?

I answer that question with three complementary tools: laboratory experiments that quantify how trace elements and isotopes behave as carbonate minerals form and recrystallize, field studies that test proxy reliability across real geological settings, and geochronology that pins down exactly when an overprinting event occurred. That combination has already overturned some working assumptions — showing, for example, that a textbook global carbon-isotope anomaly was partly rewritten by fluid flow long after deposition, and that even young, texturally pristine dolomite can carry a compromised geochemical signal.

I'm a NASA-funded postdoctoral scholar at Penn State, following a Ph.D. at the University of Manchester and an M.Sc./B.Sc. at the University of Alberta. My work has been recognized with the Ramsey Medal and the Harold Reading Medal, and I've secured independent research funding at every career stage. I mentor students through hands-on experimental and field research, and I'm now looking to build a lab of my own as a tenure-track faculty member.