Geological Oceanography
Trevor Williams
Trevor Williams
Associate Professor
Geological Oceanography
Ph.D. University of Edinburgh, 1994
Office phone: 727-553-4002
Email: trevorjwilliams@usf.edu
CV: View CV
Research: The marine sediment record of Antarctic ice sheet instability under past warm climates; provenance of ice-rafted detritus (IRD) and glacial sediment; Mediterranean Outflow Water in the late Miocene
Specialties: Paleoclimate, ice sheet history, marine geology and geophysics, climate
change.
Dr. Williams is an Associate Professor in Geological Oceanography at USF College of Marine Science. His research focusses on marine sediment records of past climate change and the history of the Antarctic ice sheet. He uses records of iceberg-rafted detritus (IRD; rock fragments and mineral grains transported out to sea in icebergs) to find times in the geological past when ice sheets became unstable and retreated, which, when combined with paleoclimate records, help us to understand the vulnerability and tipping points of ice sheets under future warm climates. Further, argon and neodymium isotope geochemistry of IRD and glacial sediment can be used to fingerprint their sources on the Antarctic continent and establish the relative stability of the ice sheet on individual ice drainage basins.
Before joining USF in 2025, Trevor Williams was an Expedition Project Manager at the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) JOIDES Resolution Science Operator (JRSO) at Texas A&M University. He sailed on five two-month-long seabed coring expeditions as staff scientist, providing guidance and leadership to international teams of scientists and coordination of the IODP technical and operations teams. From 1999鈥�2015 he was a research scientist in the IODP Borehole group at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and sailed on ten IODP expeditions as a downhole logging scientist. These expeditions investigated diverse marine geological environments, including carbonate depositional systems, cold-water carbonate mounds, glacial sedimentation, pelagic sediments, current-deposited drift systems, submarine fans, serpentinite mud volcanoes, and the basaltic ocean crust. Most recently, he sailed on IODP Expedition 401 to investigate water exchange through the Mediterranean-Atlantic gateways before and during the Messinian Salinity Crisis, when the Mediterranean was partially isolated from the Atlantic resulting in deposition of over 1-km of salts.
Williams received a B.Sc. in geology and geophysics from University of Durham, UK; a Ph.D. in paleomagnetism from the University of Edinburgh; and a one-year Royal Society postdoctoral fellowship to work on lake sediments at CEREGE, Marseille, France.