About the project
As part of this project, you will work on exciting sediment archives recovered during a recent major international scientific research expedition to the North Atlantic. This project will shed new light on fundamental shifts in Earth’s past climate as well as develop new understanding on the dynamics and causes of Earth’s magnetic field changes.
The Iberian Margin is world-famous for its rapidly accumulating marine sediments which archive high-fidelity records of both abrupt (millennial-scale) and astronomical (orbital-scale) changes of Earth’s climate. For the late Pleistocene, these records have been unambiguously correlated to ice core records from Greenland and Antarctica and used to study detailed marine-ice-terrestrial linkages. They have also been used to reconstruct changes in Earth’s magnetic field directions and strength, and environmental magnetism of these sediments has clearly recorded millennial- and orbital-scale climate variabilities. In 2022, IODP Expedition 397 (Iberian Margin Palaeoclimate) extended this remarkable sediment archive back into the Pliocene and Miocene, times of high atmospheric CO2 levels and, in the case of the Messinian Salinity Crisis, a desiccated Mediterranean Sea.
You will take advantage of this exciting breakthrough to build and exploit benchmark records of climate and geomagnetic changes to answer topical questions including, for example, when and how millennial-scale climate variability initiated, if weakened magnetic field (e.g., during excursions) has links to climate. A suite of environmental and palaeomagnetic analyses will be conducted using in-house state-of-the-art facilities at the University of Southampton. Data will be collected at high-resolution to estimate changes in Earth’s magnetic field, and reconstruct down-core magnetic particle composition, concentration, and size variations that are sensitive indicators of palaeoenvironmental changes. These magnetic data will be combined with other data including stable and radiogenic isotopes and X-ray fluorescence to precisely date the sediments, reconstruct the chain of climate events, and investigate the causes and consequences of abrupt environmental and geomagnetic change under contrasting climate states.
You will also be supervised by organisations other than the University of Southampton, including Prof David Hodell from the University of Cambridge.
