About the Project
Supervisory team: Dr Jane Reed ([Email Address Removed]); Prof Daniel Parsons; Dr Jonathan Dean; Prof Jeff Blackford.
In spite of marked progress in understanding the mechanisms and character of past climate change, the paucity of long, terrestrial records is hampering our ability to model effectively the nature of future climate change (Past Interglacials Working Group of PAGES, 2016). The Mediterranean region is one not only of complex climate and high sensitivity to future change, but is also remarkable globally in its density of ancient lakes containing sediment records of >400 ka in age. Lake sediment diatom records have long been exploited as strong proxy indicators in palaeoclimate research. Our recent research had led to exciting strides in understanding glacial-interglacial change over the last few cycles (e.g. Reed et al. 2010; Cvetkoska et al. 2015; Wilson et al. 2015; Zhang et al. 2016), but has also highlighted areas of uncertainty in predicting and understanding limnological response. It is a priority to develop deeper understanding by analysis of a wider range of boundary conditions operating in earlier Quaternary Marine Isotope Stages (MIS).
This PhD project focuses on the relatively warm, weak interglacial-glacial-interglacial cycles of MIS 7-9 (ca. 340,000 to 190,000 years ago) in two key ancient Mediterranean lakes of Ioannina, NW Greece, and Ohrid, Macedonia. They are located only ca. 60 km apart and in similar geological settings. Both are alkaline, karstic systems, but differ greatly in lake depth. Ioannina is shallow and productive (currently <10m maximum depth), with marked lake-level fluctuations in response to shifts in moisture availability, while Ohrid is the deepest (ca. 283 m maximum depth) and most ancient lake in Europe. The PhD project is in collaboration with two large, international research groups of Ioannina (Tzedakis, UCL) and SCOPSCO (Wagner, Cologne). The student will focus on Lake Ioannina, but with access to Lake Ohrid data and to existing multi-proxy data from both sites. As a deep lake of high endemic biodiversity, our primary hypothesis is that Ohrid should show higher resilience to climate change. Palynological and geochemical data allow us to test hypotheses concerning the influence of catchment dynamics vs. direct response to temperature and/or moisture availability. We aim ultimately to define the main climatic drivers of tipping points in aquatic Mediterranean ecosystems, to better understand potential threats of future climate change and to contribute to the robustness of the climatic modelling data-set.
Closing date will be the 4th of August, with interviews scheduled for the 16th August.
For informal queries please contact: Dr Jane Reed ([Email Address Removed]
Planned start date: 1st October