Professor Paul Wilson
Head of Palaeoceanography and Palaeoclimate Research Group, Professor

Professor Paul Wilson is Head of Palaeoceanography and Palaeoclimate Research Group, Professor within Ocean and Earth Science, National Oceanography Centre Southampton at the University of Southampton.
Carbon dioxide, CO2, is a powerful greenhouse gas and its concentration in Earth's atmosphere has increased by around 35% since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Levels are now higher than at any time in the past 800 thousand year (kyr) as recorded by air bubbles trapped in polar ice cores. Projections for ongoing man-made CO2 emissions show that, by 2100, levels will reach those estimated for the mid-Cenozoic (ca. 40 million years ago) when Earth was much warmer and less glaciated than today featuring, for example, a genuinely green Greenland.
These startling observations are a powerful incentive to improve our understanding of the past climate system. For example, we are working to understand the history and cause of polar ice sheet growth and decay and links to extreme variability in rainfall over the continents in regions predicted to be susceptible to dramatic change in their hydroclimate by 2100.
My research background is in palaeoceanography and palaeoclimatology. For the past 20 years or so I have worked extensively with the International Ocean Discovery Program to recover and study new climate archives from deep-sea sediments.
I have spent over a year of my life at sea working aboard the JOIDES Resolution. I am fortunate to have participated in six expeditions including two as Co-Chief Scientist:
Pacific Atolls and Guyots
Blake Nose Atlantic Depth Transect, 171B
Paleogene Pacific Latitudinal Transect
Demerara Rise Cretaceous Oceanic Anoxic Events, 207
Pacific Equatorial Age Transect, 320
Paleogene Newfoundland Sediment Drifts, 342
My PhD students, post-doctoral researchers and colleagues have participated in many others. IODP is often referred to as the space program of the Earth Sciences. It tackles big research problems in a genuinely internationally collaborative way and its outputs underpin a great deal of geoscience research in academia and industry. You can learn more about what life is like aboard the JOIDES Resolution during one of these two month-long expeditions here.