PhD in Geographical & Earth Sciences: High Resolution Palaeoenvironmental Reconstruction from Lake Suigetsu, Japan

In light of 21st century anthropogenically-influenced climatic change, one of the main scientific endeavours of our generation is to gain a fundamental understanding of the earth’s climate system. This is essential for the identification of the underlying drivers of global climate, as well as our understanding of the patterns of differential geographical responses to those drivers. Contemporary climate data lack the range of extremes and length of records needed to achieve this fundamental understanding and, for this reason, the study of long, high-resolution palaeoclimate records has become an international scientific priority.

Arguably, the best and most-widely cited record of palaeoclimatic change – the key global reference ‘type site’ – is that provided by the Greenland ice-cores, due to their highly precise suite of multi-proxy palaeoenvironmental data (NGRIP members 2004), and their annual resolution, layer-counted chronology. However, similarly high quality palaeoenvironmental archives from elsewhere in the world remain scarce.

Here, we have the opportunity to obtain such high quality, multi-proxy palaeoenvironmental data from a sediment core extracted from Lake Suigetsu, central Japan, supported by an annual precision varve chronology (spanning ~10,000 to 50,000 years before present) akin to that of the annually-layered Greenland ice-cores (Nakagawa et al. 2012; Schlolaut et al. 2018).

The global importance of the site for palaeoclimatic research was demonstrated by its recognition by Walker et al. (2009) as an auxiliary stratotype for the onset of the current interglacial, the Holocene. Moreover, >800 radiocarbon dates of terrestrial plant macrofossils picked from the Lake Suigetsu sedimentary archive, combined with the independent varve chronology, have provided the central archive for the ‘IntCal’ international consensus radiocarbon calibration curve (Bronk Ramsey et al. 2012; Reimer et al. 2013), and thus, implicitly, radiocarbon data from Suigetsu are applied by all users of radiocarbon dating, since calibration is an integral stage of the method.

The PhD research proposed here will take advantage of this exceptional chronological control to produce high resolution, cutting edge palaeoenvironmental proxy data of truly world leading quality.

The existing palaeoenvironmental data from Lake Suigetsu are primarily based upon palynological investigation (Schlolaut et al. 2017; Nakagawa et al., in prep.). However, the response of plant species (and hence the pollen records that they produce) often lags behind the causative climatic changes (at a ~decadal to centennial scale). This proposed PhD studentship will therefore focus on two complementary palaeo-environmental proxies that might be expected to demonstrate greater sensitivity (i.e. more rapid response) to climatic perturbation – biomarker compound specific isotope analysis (including D analysis; see, e.g., Rach et al. 2014) and stable isotopic analysis on extracted diatoms (18O; see, e.g., Leng and Sloane 2008).

All applicants need to meet NERC’s eligibility criteria to be considered for an IAPETUS studentship and these are detailed in NERC’s current studentship handbook.

IAPETUS is only able to consider applications from Home/European Union candidates. International candidates are not eligible to be considered and where an candidate from another EU country has not been resident in the UK for 3 years or more prior to the commencement of their studies with IAPETUS, they will only be eligible for a fees-only studentship.

IAPETUS is looking for candidates with the following qualities and backgrounds:

A first or 2:1 undergraduate degree, or have relevant comparable experience;
In addition, candidates may also hold or be completing a Masters degree in their area of proposed study or a related discipline; &
An outstanding academic pedigree and research potential, such as evidenced through the publication of articles, participation in academic conferences and other similar activities.