PhD Studentship: Carbon Storage in Soils and Vegetation Through Geological Time

Over the last 500 million years, Earth has undergone many changes that drastically altered the behaviour of the global carbon cycle and climate. These include geologically slow changes related to, for instance, plate tectonics or biological evolution, and more rapid changes induced by the release of greenhouse gasses from natural or anthropogenic sources. In response to such environmental perturbations, carbon is repartitioned between the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere with consequences for atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global temperatures. While proxies and tools exist to estimate the mass of carbon stored in the atmosphere and ocean in past and present intervals, we currently do not have a good understanding of how much carbon was/is sequestered in soils and vegetation — a critical missing piece of information that prevents us from assessing the workings of Earth’s system as a whole in past, present, and future environmental scenarios.

The objective of this PhD project is to quantify with numerical tools how carbon storage in soils and vegetation varied through key intervals in Earth history, from the time of widespread emergence of land plants about 400 million years ago, to the present day, and into the long-term future as a consequence of anthropogenic climate change. A key goal is to evaluate carbon processes that lead to a growth or decay of terrestrial carbon stocks for incorporation into intermediate complexity model frameworks, including the mathematical expressions of biological respiration and photosynthetic fluxes. A number of Earth system models of varying complexity will be assessed to reconstruct changes in the size of global carbon stocks, while also simulating feedbacks within the climate system over long timescales and study implications for related geological processes such as rates of weathering and carbon burial. The project will evaluate how well model representation of terrestrial carbon fluxes captures the influence of environmental changes that likely impacted the sensitivity of photosynthesis and respiration rates throughout the Phanerozoic Eon. The student will gain skills in numerical modelling techniques, coding, and data visualization in an interdisciplinary field with applications to future climate and paleoclimate research.

For further information on this project and details of how to apply to it please click on the above 'Apply' button.

Further information on how to apply for a CENTA studentship can be found on the CENTA website: https://centa.ac.uk/

This project is offered through the CENTA3 DTP, with funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). Funding covers an annual stipend, tuition fees (at home-fee level) and Research Training Support Grant.

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