Connecting with Keven Anukaitis

Kevin Anchukaitis from the University of Arizona is probably best known for his work on dendroclimatology, but this is changing quickly. Now, his broader interests in the connections among history, political science, archaeology, statistics, climate modeling, and forward modeling of proxies are increasingly mirrored within the broader field of late Holocene paleoclimate research. Now, it’s possible to bring together this astonishingly wide range of evidence to disentangle, for example, the influence of volcanic eruptions on climate and society. It ends up sounding like a golden age for climate science, if not for the extinct Monteverde golden toad, whose extinction Kevin showed to be due to a fungal disease coupled with natural climate variability. As always, with good science, you have to go where the evidence takes you.