About the project
This project will use a combination of numerical model outputs and observations from satellites and autonomous platforms, to investigate how physical and biological processes (and the resulting carbon dioxide uptake) respond to changing sea ice conditions in the Southern Ocean, the most important region globally for ocean anthropogenic carbon uptake.
The SO accounts for more than 40% of anthropogenic CO2 and 75% of anthropogenic heat uptake by the ocean, greatly slowing climate change. However, mechanisms and drivers of SO carbon cycling are poorly understood, partly due to the complex and variable influence of sea ice: it acts as a physical barrier to gas exchange, but also modulates light availability for phytoplankton growth, which influences biological activity and carbon sequestration.
The balance between these two effects is likely to shift as Antarctic sea ice continues to melt, making this an urgent research question. However, the direction and magnitude of change in carbon uptake are highly uncertain, as there is low confidence in the ability of state-of-the-art climate models to capture anthropogenically-forced changes in sea ice and the timing, sign and magnitude of the SO CO2 seasonal cycle.
This project will leverage recently-funded Antarctic projects, combining new observational approaches (autonomous robots, satellites) and modelling tools, to better understand under-ice processes in the SO and how these might change into the future.
The student will interrogate novel in-situ datasets, state estimates (e.g. B-SOSE, ECCO-Darwin), and a hierarchy of numerical simulations (from idealised to high resolution, realistic ocean-ice models), enabling the extraction of key relationships between physical ice-ocean-atmosphere processes and interactions with biologically-driven CO2 uptake.
The student will ultimately improve our understanding of SO physical-biogeochemical interactions and our abilities to predict future changes in a topic of great societal interest, with the support of a multidisciplinary team across a diverse range of expertise.
You will also be supervised by organisations other than the University of Southampton, including Dr Alice Marzocchi and Dr Peter Brown from National Oceanography Centre and David Munday from British Antarctic Survey.
