 Lane's work researches the mechanisms, timing and environmental impacts of past climatic change and explosive volcanism, primarily in East Africa and Europe.In 2013 Lane was involved in a project which sought to examine the impacts of the Toba supereruption in Africa using a sediment core from Lake Malawi
.The team were able to identify ash from the eruption, dated to 75,000 years before present, in the lake sediment, however found no evidence of the volcanic winter previously hypothesised.