Kim Cobb

About

Kim Cobb is a climate scientist who serves as the Director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. She is also a Professor of Environment and Society and Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences. Her work addresses challenging problems that extend beyond college campuses, emphasizing the need for collaborative efforts that are quick and effective to achieve impactful solutions at a large scale.

Research topics

• Environmental science
• Oceanography
• Geology
• Climatology
• Political Science
• Environmental economics
• Engineering
• Seismology
• Environmental planning
• Natural resource economics

Selected publications

• Transformation of coral communities subjected to an unprecedented heatwave is modulated by local disturbance

  Science Advances · 2023-04-05 · 51 citations

  articleOpen access

  Corals are imminently threatened by climate change-amplified marine heatwaves. However, how to conserve coral reefs remains unclear, since those without local anthropogenic disturbances often seem equally or more susceptible to thermal stress as impacted ones. We disentangle this apparent paradox, revealing that the relationship between reef disturbance and heatwave impacts depends upon the scale of biological organization. We show that a tropical heatwave of globally unprecedented duration (~1…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Western Pacific Warm Pool δ¹⁸O Response to the El Niño‐Southern Oscillation

  Geophysical Research Letters · 2025-02-04 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Tropical Pacific seawater and precipitation stable oxygen isotope data aid in understanding modern oceanic and atmospheric interactions, and these data are particularly valuable as they are archived in isotope‐based paleoclimate records. However, the absence of modern seawater isotope time series limits the ability to identify the atmospheric influences on these data, precluding robust paleoclimate interpretations. We present a new 10 year sub‐monthly record of seawater and precipitatio…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Borneo Stalagmite Evidence of Significantly Reduced El Niño‐Southern Oscillation Variability at 4.1 kyBP

  Geophysical Research Letters · 2024-03-23 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The timing and geographic extent of a potential “4.2 ky event” remain highly contested. Here we present records of ENSO variability at 3.8 kyBP and 4.1 kyBP derived from a Borneo stalagmite, which suggest a significant change in ENSO properties between these time intervals. The Borneo records show evidence of significantly reduced ENSO activity at 4.1 kyBP, relative to other measured windows within the Holocene. This reduced ENSO activity coincides with a period of drier conditions and…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Stable isotope tempestology of tropical cyclones across the North Atlantic and Eastern Pacific Ocean basins

  Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2024-12-19 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Tropical cyclones (TCs) are one of the major natural hazards to island and coastal communities and ecosystems. However, isotopic compositions of TC‐derived precipitation (P) in surface water (SW) and groundwater (GW) reservoirs are still lacking. We tested the three main assumptions of the isotope storm “spike” hypothesis (sudden spikes in isotopic ratios). Our database covers 40 TCs and is divided into recent ( N = 778; 2012–2023) and archived ( N = 236; 1984–1995) rainfall isotope obs…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Tropical temperature evolution across two glacial cycles derived from speleothem fluid inclusion microthermometry

  Climate of the past · 2025-09-08 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract. The evolution of tropical temperature across multiple glacial-interglacial cycles is mostly constrained with marine proxy records, which are associated with considerable uncertainties. Here we present a reconstruction of tropical cave temperatures derived from fluid inclusions in stalagmite WR5_B from Whiterock Cave (Gunung Mulu National Park, Northern Borneo). The employed paleothermometer – nucleation-assisted microthermometry – is based on the density of the water trapped in fluid i…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Fossil Coral Records of ENSO and Tropical Pacific Climate Through the Late Holocene

  NSF · $174k · 2008–2013

• RAPID Collaborative Research: Tracking coral reef impacts of the 2014/2015 El Nino event

  NSF · $34k · 2014–2015

• Collaborative Research: P2C2--Controls on Water Isotope Variability in the Tropical Pacific: A Strategy to Improve Paleoclimate Interpretations

  NSF · $226k · 2012–2016

Frequent coauthors

• Hussein R. Sayani

  Florida State University

  50 shared

• Hai Cheng

  Xi'an Jiaotong University

  38 shared

• Pamela R. Grothe

  University of Mary Washington

  36 shared

• C.D. Charles

  Scripps Institution of Oceanography

  33 shared

• Jess F. Adkins

  California Institute of Technology

  32 shared

• Julien Emile‐Geay

  University of Southern California

  27 shared

• Alyssa R. Atwood

  26 shared

• David Noone

  University of Auckland

  26 shared

Education

• PhD, Oceanography

  University of California San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography

  2002

• BA in Geology & Geophysics and Biology, with Honors, Geology & Geophysics; Biology

  Yale University

  1996

Awards & honors

• NSF CAREER Award
• Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers
• Hans Oeschger Medal from the European Geosciences Union (201…
• Elected as an AAAS Fellow (2021)
• Lead Author for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (2021)

Similar researchers at Brown University

• Laurence C. Smithh-70
• J Timmons Robertsh-62
• Amanda Lynchh-51