PhD Position in Marine Palynology & Palaeoceanography (1.0 FTE)

The Utrecht Department of Earth Sciences, group ‘Marine Palynology and Paleoceanography ’, is looking for a highly motivated PhD candidate with a MSc background in Earth Sciences, Environmental sciences, Biology or other appropriate fields. You will work on the project “Past decadal to millennial-scale variability in nutrient and carbon cycling at the North Sea - Atlantic Ocean frontier”. In this 4-year position, you will reconstruct trends and drivers of natural and anthropogenic‐mediated variability in nutrients, primary productivity and carbon burial on timescales from years to millennia in the Norwegian Trench.
The project is highly multidisciplinary and collaborative. The main goal is to determine the drivers of variability in nutrients, primary productivity and carbon fluxes in the Norwegian Trench/North Atlantic systems from recent times back into the past, beyond the observational record. You are expected to generate multiple records of organic-walled dinoflagellate cyst assemblages, pollen and spores from sediments, which will be cored from the Norwegian Trench. In addition, the project will involve the generation of inorganic (XRF) and organic geochemical biomarker records from the same sedimentary records, which will complement the reconstruction of ecosystem, environment and climate variability. A personalised training programme will be set up, mutually agreed on recruitment, which will reflect the candidate’s training needs and career objectives. As part of this training, up to 10% of your time will be dedicated to assisting in the BSc and MSc teaching programmes of the Earth Sciences department.

The position is part of a larger interdisciplinary programme, The North Sea-Atlantic Exchange (NoSE, funded by the Dutch National Science Foundation NWO to the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), Utrecht University, the University of Groningen and the Technical University of Delft. The programme involves 6 PhDs and 3 postdocs, who will all work closely together on past, present, and future carbon/nutrient cycling at the North Sea – Atlantic Ocean frontier. This particular PhD position will be at Utrecht University, in close collaboration with the NIOZ. Part of the research will hence be carried out at NIOZ. Applications for this position should follow the procedure below.

The North Sea-Atlantic Exchange (NoSE) project
The North Sea is a highly productive and heavily exploited continental shelf sea that absorbs significant quantities of atmospheric CO2. But the fate of absorbed CO2 is highly uncertain, in particular the balance between outflow into the Atlantic Ocean and burial in sediments, so we cannot accurately project how this may change in the future. In the NoSE project, a multidisciplinary consortium of researchers will determine the past, present and future role of the North Sea within the wider biogeochemical system of the Atlantic Ocean. Focusing on the Norwegian Trench, which is both the main outflow route to the Atlantic Ocean and the main place where sediments accumulate within the North Sea, we will investigate the transport and conversion processes that regulate carbon and nutrient exchange between the land, shelf sea and open ocean through a combination of oceanographic research expeditions and computer modelling. By linking these results to the palaeo record from seafloor sediments, NoSE will reveal new insights into how the cycling of carbon and nutrients in the North Sea and their exchange with the Atlantic Ocean have varied over the past thousands of years and how they may continue to evolve in the future.