Faces of Climate: Cathy Whitlock Lives in the ‘Why’

EDITOR’S NOTE: In our new series, “Faces of Climate,” Mountain Journal is highlighting good work in Greater Yellowstone. As the climate changes the face of the landscape, these people are changing our approach to it. Through interviews and imagery, these are your “Faces of Climate.”

Cathy Whitlock grew up seeing skeletons in her dad’s laboratory and cadavers in the medical school where he was a professor at Syracuse University in New York. In grade school, she wrote a report on how she wanted to be a scientist. 

The cadavers didn’t inspire her, but the outdoors did.

“When I went to college and I realized you could be a geologist and you could do science and spend a lot of time outdoors, that was the thing for me,” says Whitlock, now an expert in paleoecology and professor emerita at Montana State University.

Spanning nearly five-decades, Whitlock’s career in paleoecology has led her to write more than 200 papers on climate change. In 2017, she was a lead author on the Montana Climate Assessment and before that spent decades studying ecological change in Yellowstone National Park.

Throughout that career, extensive research and teaching instilled in her the importance of communicating science to a broader audience. She’s an expert in explaining something complicated but circling back to say, “and the reason that’s important is …” She lives in the “why.”

Another catalyst was a key mentor. Whitlock completed her undergraduate degree at Colorado College and there met Estella Leopold, daughter of renowned ecologist, conservationist and writer Aldo Leopold. Estella needed a lab assistant one summer and hired Whitlock. 

“It was so inspirational to be seeing a woman scientist operating,” Whitlock said of her mentor. 

When Estella left Colorado College, Whitlock followed her to the University of Washington to become her graduate student.

Whitlock’s research has focused on environmental change not just over decades but over thousands of years. A major focal point has been Yellowstone: how it’s developed, and the climate changes the national park has experienced long before it was designated America’s first national park.

One way of tracing back that history was by searching for particulate charcoal.

When Whitlock was a young professor, the 1988 Yellowstone wildfires burned 36 percent of the park. As a result, Whitlock became interested in the “why,” studying and reconstructing fires. 

“We had never looked for evidence of fire, and so we started looking for charcoal in the lake sediments and trying to figure out where did the charcoal come from? How far did it travel from a fire? How long did it take to get buried in the lake mud?” Whitlock said. “And we used that information as a tool to construct past fires.”

Part of that process included standing on a handmade wooden platform in the middle of a lake and pulling out tubes of mud from the lake floor, meter by meter. The researchers would do this until they hit the lake bottom, going back as far as 15,000 years.

“It’s like reading a great mystery story when I work on a lake,” Whitlock said. “I’m sort of reading it page by page, which is layer by layer in the lake mud.”

A decade ago, Whitlock began feeling she wasn’t doing enough to explain her research to the general public. The Montana Climate Assessment was a way for her to do so. Whitlock worked with the University of Montana, various tribes, federal and state agencies and nonprofits. When the assessment came out, she traveled across the state to talk about climate change.

“It really helped me grow in terms of communicating science to public audiences because I’ve talked to groups that were not necessarily convinced the climate was changing or particularly concerned about it,” Whitlock said. “That’s been the ultimate for me.”