About the project
Shifting rainfall patterns and seasons represent an alarming consequence of human-driven global climate change. Yet even the sign (wetter/drier) of future change is uncertain in some regions. This project examines the response of continental climates to global warmth in the past to study natural forcing and evaluate uncertain future predictions.
Future climate predictions agree in many aspects: rising sea levels, a warmer atmosphere, capable of holding more water vapour and big changes in annual rainfall amounts (up to 50% by 2100). However, they diverge alarmingly on where and when the rain will fall, including on even the sign of change (wetting/drying) in many regions. To help test divergent climate predictions for the future and to understand natural climate change in the past we need datasets much longer than those possible by direct observation.
We will develop palaeoclimate records from deep sea cores that contain both marine and terrigenous sediments (riverine material and wind-blown dust). These will be used to study interactions between tectonics, insolation, ice-sheets and ocean circulation that control the regional response to global warmth. State of the art palaeoclimate model experiments/output will be used to understand mechanistic forcing.
There is flexibility to focus the project to match your interests. Examples of potential foci include: (i) Regions where climate model reconstructions of the past are especially poor (e.g. North Africa). (ii) Regions where predictions of the future are clear (e.g. aridification of the Mediterranean, California and Southern Africa in the coming decades) but palaeo records are contradictory. (iii) Past intervals where global climate changed radically but the response of these and other regional hotspots is unknown (e.g. the warm Pliocene, the warm Miocene and the Eocene-Oligocene transition). (iv) Abrupt changes linked to changes in oceanic overturning circulation and/or ancient civilization collapse (appropriate further references available on request).
Supervision
As well as the supervisors listed from the University of Southampton, this project is also supervised by Dr Minmin Fu.
