Sidney Hemming

Sidney Ann Rasbury Hemming is an analytical geochemist known for her work documenting Earth's history through analysis of sediments and sedimentary rocks. She is a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University.

Education and career

Hemming earned a BS from Midwestern University in 1983 and an MS from Tulane University in 1986. In 1994 she earned her PhD from Stony Brook where she studied lead isotopes in sedimentary rocks. In 1994, Hemming started a postdoc with Wally Broecker at Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory. In 2021, Hemming received a Guggenheim Fellowship which she plans to use to study the time period between the Pliocene and the Pleistocene. and changes in North Atlantic Deep Water. In the southern Ocean, Hemming has used strontium isotopes in sediments to track changes in the strength of the Agulhas current during the Last Glacial Maximum and constrained the location of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. In California, her research on past climate conditions at Mono Lake revealed chemical signatures in the sediments recorded the Laschamp event, a global geomagnetic shift. In the North Atlantic Ocean, Hemming's research on Heinrich events has constrained the amount of ice-rafted debris moved by icebergs into the North Atlantic Ocean.

Selected publications

Awards and honors Fellow, American Geophysical Union (2018) Fellow, Geochemical Society (2020) Guggenheim Foundation Fellow (2021)