2025
Peter Crockford
Sloan Research Fellowship CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar
2025
Sloan Research Fellowship CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar
Long before modern technology could measure climate change, the Earth recorded its own history in stone — and Dr. Peter Crockford has built a career reading that record. An Associate Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University, Crockford works in Earth system science, leading a research group that reconstructs Earth’s recent and ancient past by examining chemical traces in rocks and fossils. By reading these chemical records, his work seeks to unravel how life on Earth and its climate have co-evolved over billions of years.
A defining influence of Crockford’s research path was his captivation with “Snowball Earth” glaciations, a time when the Earth was frozen from poles to equator. More than just an interesting time in Earth’s history, these episodes present profound scientific challenges — which his research continues to analyze to better understand how Earth’s systems respond to extreme change.
While his research is rooted in the past, Crockford’s work can help answer today’s most important questions about Earth — and beyond. By studying how Earth behaved under extreme conditions, his research helps scientists better understand how planets evolve and how environments change over time. “It is often noted that the past is the key to understanding the future,” he says. “However, in the age of advanced telescopes, one could argue the deep past is the key to understanding the remote observations of distant exoplanets.”
Through his research, Dr. Peter Crockford plays a key role in connecting fundamental questions about Earth’s ancient history to emerging frontiers in science, deepening our understanding of not only our planet, but worlds far beyond it.
