About the project
Underneath the shallow Arctic shelves relict subsea permafrost contains a large reservoir of carbon including methane. This project investigates how ocean changes will affect future subsea permafrost degradation, the associated methane release and biogeochemical impacts in the marine environment.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and there is evidence that it is being released from areas, e.g. Siberia, where submarine permafrost is melting due to ocean warming. Where and how much will submarine permafrost degrade by 2100? How much methane might be released? What would be the impact of both submarine permafrost degradation and the associated methane release on the marine environment?
To answer these questions, we will apply a modelling approach that combines the Nucleus for European Modelling of the Ocean (NEMO) ocean model and a simplified representation of the dynamic processes governing submarine permafrost melting, associated gas released, and bathymetry changes. The first step would be to review existing data on submarine permafrost occurrence, generating a map that can be added into NEMO.
The project aims to develop a model configuration with two-way interaction between the ocean and the sediment, to investigate permafrost degradation caused by downward heat or salt fluxes and how these degradation and associated changes affect the ocean. To accommodate the student’s interests, the project allows flexibility to focus on either physical or biogeochemical impacts through numerical modelling. A physical focus might be on the formation of subsea pingos and their impact on bathymetry. A biogeochemical focus would investigate the effect of methane gas released from the degraded permafrost into the ocean and assess spatial and temporal changes in ocean acidification. This application would improve the assessment of the marine carbon budget by better constraining the temporal contribution from marine permafrost in the Arctic, with potential for improved climate change predictions.
You will also be supervised by organisations other than the University of Southampton, including Dr Stefanie Rynders and Dr Yevgeny Aksenov from the National Oceanography Centre.
