Luke Skinner

Past climate and carbon cycle change; using proxy data and numerical methods to understand the Earth System.

 

Research Area

My research looks at the Earth’s climate system (https://pastclimate.esc.cam.ac.uk), including in particular the impacts of ocean circulation on hydrological- and biogeochemical cycling.  My work aims to provide a geological perspective on the climate system and its dynamics on relatively short time scales (10-10,000 yrs): time-scales that are relevant to past and future human activities. I use a range of geochemical, sedimentological and micropalaeontological methods to infer past environmental change (e.g. trace elements, stable and radiogenic isotopes), and I work closely with numerical modelers to place such observations within a coherent interpretative framework.  Active research areas include: 1) the causes and consequences of abrupt change during the late Pleistocene (i.e. ‘Dansgaard-Oeschger’ and ‘Heinrich’ events); 2) the deep ocean’s temperature, oxygenation and carbonate ion response to climate change, and its link to atmospheric CO2; 3) laser-ablation analysis techniques to understand rare earth element and redox sensitive element cycling; 4) the role of the ocean in glacial-interglacial CO2 change and the evolution of the marine radiocarbon inventory across the last deglaciation; 5) the hydraulics of the last Lake Agassiz ‘super-flood’; and 6) speleothem records of terrestrial climate change in Southern Europe (including links to local archaeological stratigraphy).

 

Project Interests

I am especially keen to support PhD projects in four key areas:

1. Radiocarbon as a carbon cycle tracer to infer the ocean’s role in rapid CO2 change (in collaboration with modelers and ice-core scientists at BAS and in France).
2. The seasonality of past abrupt climate change using high-resolution marine records from the Iberian Margin, combined with numerical modelling.
3. Novel numerical methods (e.g. machine learning) to infer marine geochemical inventories from sparse observations.
4. Speleothem records of past hydroclimate change in central Italy and the Italian Alps (with opportunities for fieldwork, and collaboration with archaeologists).