Podcast: 5 minutes with Khushboo Gurung
In this episode of 5 Minutes With, we chat to Dr Khushboo Gurung, Research Fellow at the University of Leeds and a recipient of the 2025 President’s Award from the Geological Society.
Dr Khushboo Gurung, Research Fellow at the University of Leeds (© Amy Shipley)
Episode Transcript
[00:10] Marissa Lo: Hello and welcome to Five Minutes With, a podcast by Geoscientist magazine. My name is Marissa Lo and today I’m joined by Dr Khushboo Gurung, a Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. Can you tell us what you’re currently working on?
[00:24] Khushboo Gurung: So currently I’m trying to incorporate the evolution of rooted land plants into a larger climate chemical model called SCION (Spatial Continuous Integration) and see what their impact is on the atmospheric oxygen and CO2 levels over the Phanerozoic, so roughly the past 540 million years. So plants have been around since at least 470 million years, and their evolution on land has been theorised to make really quite big changes to processes that shape climate, especially the evolution of roots, which came about during the Devonian, so roughly 420 million years ago. And having bigger roots meant that, not only could plants grow bigger and expand their territory, they also increased weathering rates, which draws down CO2, and the burial of organic carbon over time is also key to the rise in oxygen levels.
However, oftentimes when you look at these long-term climate models, they tend to oversimplify how they represent vegetation, it’s usually just a constant global value. So the SCION model is a climate chemical model. It’s a step up from the traditional box models that people have used for a very long period of time. What’s unique about it is that there is a spatial aspect to it, and we can sort of see variation in rates of processes spatially rather than having a global constant. I started this work during my PhD and the first thing I did was create this very simple vegetation model called FLORA (Fast Land Occupancy and Reaction Algorithm), and all FLORA really does is that it takes, you know, environmental parameters like temperature, it calculates photosynthesis rates and accumulates biomass over time, which gives us a better idea of potential fluctuation in vegetation over time. Taking FLORA and incorporating it into SCION, we can now get spatially explicit information of where biomass was and how much it impacted sort of weathering rates in different areas. And it gives us a much clearer idea of how, where, and when vegetation might have played a much bigger role in sort of tipping over climate states.
[02:47] Marissa Lo: What’s a typical day for you at the moment?
[02:49] Khushboo Gurung: I spend a lot, a lot of my time just in front of a computer coding. I’d say it’s sort of a very unique line of work just because with coding it can be very unpredictable. So you can never tell how many errors you’re going to get or how long it’s going to take you to solve them. A lot of my time is just spent debugging it and making sure that the model predictions look plausible. And if I’m not coding, I’ll probably just be reading up on papers regarding past vegetation and climate because my research area is quite broad in terms of the geological timescale. There’s just a lot to catch up on.
[03:33] Marissa Lo: What’s your favourite thing about your research?
[03:36] Khushboo Gurung: I really enjoy the coding aspect of it and being able to use that to answer sort of the very big broad questions that we have about our past climate. I mean, where else would I be able to just sit and think about what life used to be like millions of years ago and how did the planet become habitable? But I also really love the team that I’m in and I love bouncing ideas off of people and getting to meet a lot of likeminded people from all around the world. Academia has its obstacles, but I really enjoy doing it.
[04:16] Marissa Lo: So let’s say there’s an undergraduate student who is really interested in looking at palaeoclimate and past vegetation. What advice would you give to them if they wanted to get involved in this research, you know, later in their academic career?
[04:31] Khushboo Gurung: This line of research: modelling is 90% of it. There’s no better way of learning how to model and how to code than by practicing it. And even if you don’t end up in academia, you now have this new skill, new great skill that you can use for your next career. In terms of the science side of things, having some background knowledge on plants and the climate history is useful and knowing how they interact in sort of a planetary scale is useful. But because you’re going to be dealing with the entire Phanerozoic, I think it’s key to familiarise yourself with sort of what occurred in the past in broad strokes rather than trying to be bogged down in the specific of things. This is also quite an interdisciplinary line of work. Not only do you have to deal with a lot of information spanning long periods of time, you also have to create some sort of cohesion between two different lines of research, which I found was the biggest task. It’ll take me many, many, many more years to even say that I’m an expert in any of it. So my advice is just to keep on persevering and keep learning and keep being curious about science.
[05:50] Marissa Lo: Great, that’s a lovely place to end it. So thank you so much, Khushboo.
