Are you passionate about contributing to research on climate change impacts, which are becoming increasingly urgent? Join the University of Utrecht team in expanding their understanding of topics such as the effectiveness of risk reduction measures and their physical feasibility amidst rising climate change and sea-level rise.

At the department of Physical Geography , researchers explore these adaptation options and link them to adaptation pathways aiming to promote sustainable deltas. To contribute to this research, they seek a team of THREE PhD candidates who will each work on a separate project:

1. Global Delta Adaptation Physical Solution Space
aims to understand adaptation measures in deltas globally to climate-driven flood- risk due to sea- level rise and changes in river flows. The selected candidate will work on a quantitative approach to assess the effectiveness and physical feasibility of different adaptation measures and pathways under a range of climate and socio-economic scenarios. Methods include model-based flood- risk analysis and pathways generation, which will result in an assessment of delta adaptation pathways and resources globally.

2. Rhine-Meuse Delta Adaptation to Extreme Compound Events
focuses on understanding adaptation measures and pathways to uncertain compounding climate extremes such as extreme rainfall, river flow, and storm surge. You will work on modelling water management and land use change measures under scenarios involving multiple hazards for the Rhine-Meuse delta. With this model you can assess the physical feasibility of adaptation measures that work with the functioning of the natural environment (“What does the delta want?”). The research will be carried out in collaboration with Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch government authority for public works and water management.

3. Strategies to Enhance Sedimentation for Delta Adaptation
is about sedimentation in deltas as adaptation strategy to relative sea-level rise. The selected candidate will explore strategies to reintroduce sedimentation to discover their potential and limitations worldwide. The selected candidate will develop a generic modeling approach to quantify the effectiveness of these strategies in reducing flood risk. This model can then be used to better understand the role of sediments in delta adaptation, and their potential in combination with other adaptation measures to enhance delta sustainability.

To support academic and personal development, PhD candidates follow courses and assist in teaching Earth Sciences at Bachelor's and Master's level. Together these activities amount to twenty percent of the contracted time.

This studentship has two related projects.

Project A: the development of a Climate Generator: A Bayesian stochastic emulator of expensive General circulation climate models. This project will explore different approaches to emulating the response of computationally expensive climate models for glacial cycle ice sheet modelling contexts.

Project B: Building on the discussion in
https://www.physics.mun.ca/~lev/revCalG.pdf, this project will compare different stochastic process and Bayesian artificial neural network emulators for history matching contexts and refine methodologies for history matching in paleo ice and climate modelling contexts.

This studentship has two related projects:

Project 1A: History matching (cf https://www.physics.mun.ca/~lev/revCalG.pdf) of a global coupled ice and climate model for the last glacial cycle. From Last Glacial Maximum onward, glacial geology and relative sea level data provide a strong set of constraints which are a challenge to fit. Conversely, prior to LGM, there are much fewer constraints on ice sheet evolution aside from far-field sea level proxies. However there are many more constraints on regional climate from ice core, terrestrial, and marine core records. This history matching will therefore focus on pre-LGM global ice sheet and climate evolution relying more on paleoclimate constraints.

Project 1B: Using the history-matched parameter vectors from project 1A, examine the stability of select glacial cycles of the last 2 million years especially in the context of explaining the mid-Pleistocene transition from approximately 40 kyr glacial cycles to 100 kyr cycles. This will entail analysis of noise sensitivity (eg from large volcanic events), the impact of changing topography due to subglacial erosion and sediment transport, and the testing of simplified carbon cycle representations. These projects will rely on a hierarchy of coupled ice and climate models including the LCice2.0 coupled glacial system model (GSM) and LOVECLIM EMIC (an earlier version was detailed in Bahadory and Tarasov, GMD, 2018, Bahadory et al, CP 2021) as well as a new version coupled to the Plasim GCM (Andres and Tarasov, CP 2019). A key relevant feature of LCice is the state-of-the-art fully coupled sub-glacial sediment processes model in the GSM (cf Drew and Tarasov, https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2024/egusphere-2024-620/)

PhD Candidate is sought for a fully funded PhD program at Durham University (UK) in the Departments of Earth Sciences and Geography to research the climatic change on the Greenland Ice Sheet over the Late Cenozoic to establish lineages to future climate change.
Recent studies have highlighted the sensitivity of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) to future climate warming with significant implications for global sea-level rise and impacts on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Understanding the past evolution of the GrIS and the interaction with broader climate changes is key to improving our understanding of the potential future response of the GrIS to ongoing climate change. Yet, there are significant gaps in our knowledge in respect to the evolution of the GrIS associated with past climate changes. For example, the detailed evolution and cycles of growth and decay of the GrIS during the time period covering the Pliocene through the Pleistocene (the last 4 – 5 million years) that encompasses numerous fluctuations between warmer and cooler climates. To address these questions the project will build on ongoing research develop-ing and applying a novel technique, osmium-isotopes, to reconstructing ice sheet dynamics associat-ed with development and growth of a Northern GrIS onto and across the continental shelf into the marine environment. Utilising seafloor sediment cores our recent research shows osmium-isotopes can be used to track periods of increased delivery of continental material due to glacial erosion out to the Greenland continental margin and into Baffin Bay (Ownsworth et al., 2023). The osmium-isotope signal in marine cores is, therefore, sensitive to the growth and expansion of the GrIS onto and across the continental shelf during colder intervals and subsequent retreat from the shelf during warmer intervals.

The PhD project, as part of the Carlsberg Foundation funded project INTERACT, will examine the Holocene history of Arctic marine mammals, by investigating fossil specimens of several species (incl. beluga, bowhead, polar bear) with ancient DNA and stable isotope analysis. Specifically, your research would focus on investigating patterns of demographic change and shifts in foraging ecology. The fossil data will be understood in the context of the genomic diversity and structuring of contemporary populations. The project includes working in a clean lab environment for ancient DNA data generation, and bioinformatic processing and analysis of the data. The PhD student is expected to first-author papers in international peer-reviewed journals. The PhD student will work closely with collaborators in Canada and Greenland during the project, and with the other members of the Molecular Ecology and Global Climate Change group.