Russell is a Quaternary scientist who studies Earth's past climate using geochemical proxies from cave deposits (speleothems). He is part of the Speleothem Science Research Group (www.speleothemscience.org) that spans the Schools of Geography and Earth Sciences. He is one of a group of Physical Geographers specialising in Quaternary climate and environmental change. His current research focuses on the nature and causes of major climate transitions during the Quaternary Period, especially glacial terminations and abrupt 'millennial-scale' climate events. He is particularly interested in these events play out regionally and across the globe, and what forces these changes. Russell works closely with oceanographers, ice-core scientists and palaeoclimate modellers to resolve these problems. Russell runs a fully equipped microsampling and stable isotope laboratory dedicated to the study of speleothem (and other carbonate-based) climate records. His lab complements the suite of analytical instruments housed in the School of Earth Sciences. The lab has two Analytical Precision AP2003 continuous-flow stable isotope ratio mass spectrometers for measuring carbon and oxygen isotope ratios on carbonates (one active, one on standby); a Picarro cavity-ring down isotope analyser for measuring oxygen and hydrogen isotope ratios in waters (soon to be modified to measure fluid inclusions in speleothems); and a Nu Instruments "Perspective" dual-inlet isotope-ratio mass spectrometer configured to measure small-sample (50 ug) conventional carbon and oxygen isotopes as well as clumped-isotopes (delta-47) on carbonates (sample size ~500 ug). Russell welcomes enquiries from colleagues and their graduate students interested in running samples. Collaborative rates apply (send him an email for a schedule of prices). He is also open to commercial work. Recent work comparing the radiometric ages of 11 Middle-to-Late Pleistocene ice-age terminations suggests that a forcing factor combining both precession and obliquity provides the most coherent explanation for the pacing of glacial-interglacial cycles. During the Early Pleistocene, however, terminations occurred every ~40,000 years, equivalent to the time it takes for Earth to complete a single obliquity cycle. While this has led many to presume that obliquity changes alone were responsible for pacing Early Pleistocene terminations, others have argued that the precession component in ocean records of global ice-volume change is obscured during these smaller glaciations, leaving the question of forcing unresolved. This project will combine palaeoclimate proxy time series from a unique archive of speleothems from Italy and China with high-resolution North Atlantic ocean records to investigate the timing and forcing of glacial terminations during the Early Pleistocene. Until recently, absolute ages of terminations have been limited to the range of the U-Th dating method (about 600,000 years), but recent advances in the U-Pb geochronometer enable us to potentially constrain the timing of terminations across the whole Pleistocene. This project will use clumped isotopes from the U-Pb dated Italian speleothems to develop palaeotemperature time series to which sea-surface temperature records from Iberian margin ocean cores can be synchronized. This will place the ocean-core data onto a radiometric time scale, enabling the timing of ice-sheet collapse to be obtained from surface- and deep-ocean proxies. U-Pb dated Chinese speleothems, which provide records of the status of the Asian monsoon, will be used to test whether the links between ice-sheet collapse, North Atlantic ocean changes and the Asian monsoon observed over the Middle-to-Late Pleistocene interval persisted in the Early Pleistocene. The results of this research will lead to advances in palaeoclimate theory and provide a means by which future long ice-core records can be chronologically constrained.