About the project
Marine phytoplankton are key players in the global carbon cycle, responsible for half of Earth’s primary production. The Southern Ocean is responsible for high productivity rates but it’s also experiencing rapid climatic changes. This project will focus on understanding how polar phytoplankton and the biological carbon pump respond to a changing climate.
This project examines how climate change affects phytoplankton dynamics and the carbon cycle in polar regions. Both poles are experiencing rapid climatic shifts, so, understanding how phytoplankton and carbon dynamics are affected is crucial to predict long-term changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
You will explore and quantify relationships between climate-driven changes in environmental drivers (temperature, nutrient stocks, stratification, etc) and phytoplankton growth rates, community composition shifts and changes in the consequent carbon export. For this, you will use existing datasets (from ships, satellites, gliders, biogeochemical-Argo, models), in particular, long-term ecological timeseries (e.g. Rothera Time-series, Palmer-LTER) to evaluate long-term trends and provide a broader context for your own research. This will allow you to explore how changes in the polar environment over extended periods affect phytoplankton dynamics and carbon cycling. You will learn how to design and carry out experiments in the field, and get hands-on experience with cutting-edge technologies, like underwater gliders to investigate phytoplankton responses to a warming climate.
You’ll have the chance to work with a diverse team of physical, chemical, and biological oceanographers, who will help you gain a holistic understanding of how climate change is affecting polar marine ecosystems. Given the interdisciplinary nature of this research topic, depending on your interests and skillset, this project can focus more on the bio-physical processes driving changes in phytoplankton dynamics and carbon export, leveraging heavily on large bio-optical datasets, or the biogeochemical/ecological consequences on rapidly changing polar regions, using experimental data (existing and newly collected).
You will also be supervised by organisations other than the University of Southampton, including Filipa Carvalho from the National Oceanography Centre, Hugh Venables, and Kate Hendry from the British Antarctic Survey.
