Scholz’s research focuses on recovering records of past climate from lake basins, and on the sedimentary basin analysis of extensional systems, with emphasis on lacustrine basins. Current research efforts are concentrated on the large lakes of tropical Africa and the Finger Lakes of Central New York. Lake basins contain some of the highest quality archives of climate change on the continents, and new drill core records from the low-latitude lakes of Africa are revealing new details about the Pleistocene record of climate change. Recent field programs have involved scientific drilling in tropical lake basins, the recovery of high-resolution sediment cores from lakes, and the imaging of sedimentary lake basins at various scales, using seismic reflection datasets techniques. Support for the research comes from the National Science Foundation and a consortium of oil and gas companies.