Profile photo of Yuem Park.


I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Earth & Planetary Science at the University of California, Berkeley

My research seeks to understand the triggers behind long-term changes in climate throughout Earth’s history through a combination of:

statistical methods and numeric modeling

field observations and measurements

lab analyses on collected samples

gauges indicate relative time spent in each


I mostly focus on trying to understand the long-term drivers of climate change.

Very rarely throughout Earth’s history, the whole planet manages to plunge itself into a globally glaciated state. In particular, ~720 million years ago, the Earth entered one of these dramatic Snowball Earth glacial events after about 1.5 billion years of relatively clement climatic conditions.

What caused global glaciation ~720 million years ago?

~1000-550 million years ago, Earth witnessed several events that were critical for shaping our planet as it exists today, including the rapid evolution of microbial life and a rise in atmospheric oxygen to near-modern levels. Given that the Earth system is very sensitive to the configuration of the continents at any given time, constraining where the continents were throughout this time is critical for better understanding these important events.

How were the continents configured ~800 million years ago?

On million year time scales, Earth’s climate mostly fluctuates between a warm ice-free state and a cooler glacial state in which finite ice caps exist at the poles.

What processes are responsible for setting Earth’s long-term climate state?

Over the past 15 million years, Earth’s climate has been cooling. Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain this cooling trend, but with no consensus. However, Indonesia and New Guinea represent an outsized contribution to modern carbon dioxide consumption.

Are Indonesia and New Guinea responsible for cooling over the past 15 million years?


Some places that research and life have taken me to.

images taken using Nikon d7000 with 35mm prime lens