Reconstructing past climate and environmental change over decadal to millennial time scales using chemical, isotopic and particulate material from ice cores.
Research Area
I lead the ice core research group at the British Antarctica Survey, which includes the UK ice core labs (-25°C cold labs, class-100 cleanroom, and wet chemistry). I lead ice core drilling expeditions to Antarctica, the Arctic, and glaciated mountain regions to retrieve ice cores that preserve information about past climate and environmental change.
I utilise a suite of chemical, isotopic and particulate material preserved in ice cores to reconstruct past changes in temperature, snowfall, sea ice and atmospheric circulation. My research has focused on changes in surface mass balance, and the contribution to global mean sea levels. I am interested in using ice cores to explore the drivers of ice sheet instability, including the role of atmospheric circulation and winds driving Holocene ice sheet volume changes and/or ice shelf collapse. I develop novel proxies for winds and sea ice and am interested in the role they play in modulating the uptake and release of CO2 in the Southern Ocean. Current projects include a new deep ice core from the Antarctic Peninsula (spanning the past ~20,000 years), ice cores from Antarctic ice shelves (exploring fracture properties and melt) and ice cores from coastal domes and sub-Antarctic islands.
Project Interests
Potential projects could utilise the new deep ice core from the Antarctic Peninsula, or existing ice cores from our archive (including ice shelf or sea ice cores), to explore the following topics:
- Reconstructing past sea ice extent - sea salts, MSA or organic compounds (e.g. fatty acids).
- Combining ice shelf or firn observations (melt, density, grain size) with remote sensing.
- Particulate material of either biological (marine diatoms, pollen), extra-terrestrial (micrometeorites), volcanic (tephra) and anthropogenic (pollutants, fly ash) sources - how they are deposited regionally and how they vary through time.
- Reconstructing marine primary productivity- major ions or organic compounds.
