Early in her career, she focused on carbonate geochemistry, dolomitization, and sequence stratigraphy to reconstruct the stable and Sr isotopic composition of early Paleozoic seawater and to document mechanistic linkages between sea-level change, stratigraphic cyclicity, ocean chemistry, and the origin of massive dolomites.
Her work on past periods of major climate change spans the marine to terrestrial realms and integrates field and laboratory studies with numerical modeling.
Over the past two decades, Montañez has played an active role in shaping the NSF's and the National Academy of Science's appreciation of deep-time paleoclimate and paleoceanographic records and their relevance to society.
The article also talks about the effect of fauna 230 million years ago, as dinosaurs existed as the largest carnivores and smallest herbivores.
An important point made was the idea that the extinction of nondinosaurian herbivores was not caused by an increase in dinosaur diversity.
This idea challenged the previously accepted notion that dinosaurs ascended the food pyramid due to opportunism.
The recent unprecedented rate of increasing atmospheric CO2 raises concerns about melting ice sheets, rising sea level, major climate change, and biodiversity loss - all of which were evident more than 300 million years, the only other time in Earth's history when high CO2 accompanied ice at the polar regions.