Current research degree projects
Explore our current postgraduate research degree and PhD opportunities.
Explore our current postgraduate research degree and PhD opportunities.
Gravel barrier shorelines offer widespread, critically important natural flood protection to many coastal communities. Their management, creation and enhancement are increasingly seen as sustainable, while providing nature-based adaptation options that boost natural capital. But these assets must be well managed to ensure they continue serving such functions in the face of increased risk of coastal erosion and flooding.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) plays a critical role in decadal climate variability with impacts on sea level, regional weather patterns, and thus flooding, which poses a significant hazard to coastal infrastructure, including the UK’s Nuclear Power Plants. The overall goal of this project is to address fundamental questions about the causes and consequences of flooding around the UK’s coastlines over the next 100 years.
The magnitude of future warming will depend upon the strength of carbon cycle feedback mechanisms. However, there are carbon cycle feedbacks that we still know little about. This PhD project will test whether CO2 release from sedimentary rocks is a missing carbon cycle feedback in past and future warm climates.
Continental breakup can generate huge volumes of magmatism that are generally attributed to the influence of mantle plumes. The project will use new seismic data from the continental margin of Brazil to investigate variations in magmatism along this margin that appear to contradict current understanding of how plumes work.
Life in the ocean is sustained by nitrogen fixation, a microbial process supplying bioavailable nitrogen. This project will explore biological controls on nitrogen fixation in the Indian Ocean, bridging cell to ocean scale nitrogen fluxes in the least explored basin in the world’s oceans.
Long-term environmental monitoring of changes to the seabed is rare but important, particularly as climate change accelerates. Seabed photography makes it possible, but inconsistency in application reduces comparability. This project will assess climate-related ecological change in benthic fauna and develop the consistency in seabed photography key to future marine monitoring.
Microscopic tyre-wear particles of synthetic rubber, plastic compounds and chemical additives are generated as car tyres wear out. Yet unquantified, tyre-wear could be the largest source of microplastics in the aquatic environment. This project will address the knowledge gap regarding presence, pathways and impact of tyre-wear in the ocean.
Tropical predators are becoming established within temperate communities as a response to climate warming (tropicalisation), but with unknown consequences. This project will use an interdisciplinary approach to understand the eco-evolutionary impacts of altered predator-prey interactions of marine species and communities undergoing tropicalisation while helping to inform management strategies.
The ocean is losing its breath. Persistent ocean deoxygenation causes disruptions in the nutrient cycle with devastating consequences for ecosystems, but its future remains unclear. This project will use cutting-edge geochemical proxies and climate simulations to better understand the response of oxygen minimum zones and the knock-on effects on marine biodiversity to climate change.
This project aims to use multiple climate proxies and novel sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) and fecal biomarker analyses to reconstruct past environmental changes in Taiwan over the past 5000 years. The goal is to date and understand the environmental stressors that led to the ancestral Polynesian migration from Taiwan to the Pacific Ocean.