A human story
Having found geoscience by “happy accident” and now established as a Quaternary researcher, Amy McGuire explains how her work provides insight into environmental change – in the past, present and future.
Amy spent childhood summers among glacial erratics in Donegal, Ireland, and now researches Quaternary climatic and environmental change (© Getty)
Hailing from the westernmost tip of County Donegal, Ireland, Amy McGuire recounts spending her childhood summers “nestled in an ice age landscape that I didn’t understand.” Studying geoscience at undergraduate level and learning about how that landscape formed was therefore something of a revelation.
“I learnt that my favourite rock, which sat in the field opposite my house and which I used to pretend was my car, was a glacial erratic, and all the ‘go-faster stripes’ were glacial striae.”
Today, Amy is a Quaternary researcher based at the University of Leeds, UK, looking specifically at the nature and timing of climatic and environmental changes over the past ~2.58 million years. Amy credits much of her success on her academic journey to an incredible support network: “Learning from brilliantly clever but also kind and compassionate women has been vital because it has given me something to aspire to. The broader geoscience community – both in the UK and internationally – also feeds my never-ending search for knowledge, keeping me unspeakably enthusiastic about the work I do.”
Geology and archaeology
To reconstruct past climatic and environmental conditions, Amy studies her “absolute favourite thing” – mud! Using sediment cores from the southern North Sea, she combines palynology (the study of pollen and spores) with various geochronological dating techniques to determine how and when ecosystems changed in the past, often with surprising results.
“Regional subsurface models suggested these North Sea cores should span the last 130,000 years. However, by combining detailed pollen study with palaeomagnetic and luminescence age estimates, I have demonstrated that the sequences likely date to around 1 million years ago. Therefore, these sediments represent the first direct evidence of a land bridge that would have spanned the North Sea while the earliest known hominins were migrating to Britain, and they therefore have the potential to provide new insights into our human story.”
Geology provides vital context to understand human migration, adaptation, and evolution. The landscapes we reconstruct are those that would have been occupied by the first hominins in northwest Europe
To truly understand the human story globally, geoscience – and particularly geochronology – will need to keep pace with advances in the archaeological record.
“Geology provides vital context to understand human migration, adaptation, and evolution. The landscapes we reconstruct are those that would have been occupied by the first hominins in northwest Europe, and therefore we can provide crucial insights into their lives by studying the geological record. Integrating archaeological and palaeoenvironmental records is, however, a significant undertaking, and I think this is where geochronology is absolutely vital: we need to know both accurately and precisely when climatic and environmental changes happened if we are to have any hope of linking them to developments interpreted from the archaeological record.”
Collaboration and communication
Amy’s work is relevant not just for understanding the past but also for understanding the potential impacts of current and future climatic and environmental change. She is clear in her assertion that to achieve this requires both global, multidisciplinary collaboration and careful communication.
“As our climate system nears states not known in all of human history, there is ever more need to understand what a warmer world might look like. Geologists have a key role in informing our understanding of tipping elements in the global climate system, particularly those components that are slower to respond to rising CO2 levels and warming, such as the ocean, as well as permafrost environments. But if we are to produce data that provide insight into these processes, we must also work closely with the (palaeo)climate modelling communities to understand where the greatest uncertainties lie and to identify which further geological data are needed to advance our understanding of the global climate system. We live in a rapidly changing world, both climatically and politically. Together, we need to think carefully about how we can communicate the uncertainties in our understanding of the Earth system effectively, without diluting our core message that ongoing global change is an existential risk to life on Earth.”
Sustainable geoscience
Amy is also a passionate advocate for making the study of geoscience itself more sustainable. She questions how we can train the next generation of geoscientists, ensuring we give them the necessary skills to study Earth (and other planets), without harming the natural environment. Indeed, many geoscientists today find themselves in a difficult position: as Amy notes, it is vital to see the world in order to understand it, but that doesn’t automatically justify global jet-setting by our community.
“Long-distance air travel for short trips doesn’t feel necessary, especially here in Europe where we have an extremely geologically varied continent at our disposal!”
Amy’s whole approach to research provides a wonderful example of the importance of innovation, collaboration and responsible scientific practices as we seek to better understand our planet and its history.
Dr Amy McGuire is a Research Fellow in Quaternary Palynology at the University of Leeds, UK, and the 2025 recipient of the Geological Society’s Wollaston Fund.
Interview by Amy Whitchurch, Executive Editor, Geoscientist magazine
