Tom Arney is a geochemist at the University of Southampton, based at the National Oceanography Centre Southampton. After a BSc in Geology at Van Mildert College, Durham, he worked for four years in the tech industry before returning to science in the form of a master's in Oceanography at Southampton, which led into a PhD in the overlap of Geology and Oceanography: palaeoceanography. After developing new geochemical tools and analyses for investigating the past extent of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet via marine sediments, he swapped the frozen South for the balmy tropics, where he now analyses the geochemistry of coral reefs to recover past records of sea surface temperatures.