Funded Research Projects
The following details ongoing funded research projects and
work.
CREPE
CREPE (Carbon Removal: Efficient Pre-treatment for Electrochemistry) is funded by the CO2RE programme, and will be developing efficient seawater pre-treatment for Direct Ocean Capture .
BRICS
BRICS - Biologys Role In ocean Carbon Storage - a gap analysis. BRICS is part of the NERC BIOCARBON programme and focuses on identifying the gaps in our understandingv of biological controls on the marine carbon cycle and ability to simulate this within models. This project is led by Steph Henson at NOC.
Convex Seascape
This recently funded project will deliver a step change in our understanding of how blue carbon approaches can contribute to the pathway to Net Zero.
SeaCURE: Seawater Carbon Unlocking and REmoval Phase 2
£3M follow up from the Phase one project (below) focused on (1) design and build of a 100T/year pilot plant, (2) Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV), (3) marine impacts and (4) commercilisation pathways, risks and barriers.
SeaCURE: Seawater Carbon Unlocking and REmoval Phase 1
To
reduce the risk of experiencing dangerous climate change
and reach net zero, it is now necessary
necessary to actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
However, direct removal of CO2 from air is
hampered by its very low concentration in the
atmosphere (0.04%). SeaCURE harnesses two natural properties of
the ocean that can circumvent this problem. (1) The
amount of carbon dissolved in a seawater is approximately
150 times higher than its concentration in air, making
extraction significantly easier and quicker, (2) we can
utilise the ocean’s vast surface area to absorb CO2 from the
enormous volume of air sitting above it, rather than
having to push all of that air through air-based CO2 capture facilities.
SeaCURE brings together established technologies with novel techniques to deliver a system that removes CO2 from seawater and
releases the CO2-depleted water back to the
ocean, where it will naturally re-absorb an
equivalent amount of CO2 from the
atmosphere. SeaCURE brings together world leading expertise from the University of Exeter, the
Plymouth Marine Laboratory Brunel University of London and Eliquo Hydrok, a Cornwall based engineering firm with leading expertise in water processes.
We have proved the concept and are now building a pilot plant to remove at 100 tonnes of CO2 a year. Data from this pilot will be used to build commercially viable CO2 removal at the
the scale required to help us deliver Net Zero, then keep globally averaged temperature below 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming.
GRIP: Global Reef Impact Projections
GRIP bring together Exeter, NOAA and University of Queensland scientists to establish a set of proto-operational tools for predicting and projecting stress on global coral reefs, and deliver a long-term partnership to provide coral reef managers with a step-change in decision-making support. The project is funded through the NERC Global Partnerships fund.
SEACHANGE, Quantifying
the impact of major cultural transitions on
marine ecosystem functioning and biodiversity
SEACHANGE, Quantifying the impact of major cultural transitions on marine ecosystem functioning and biodiversity
The seas are changing. Marine
conservation seeks to protect valuable habitats but the
pristine state of marine ecosystem functioning and
biodiversity – that is, the system as it operated before
there was any large scale human impact – is conjectural.
Conservation management strategies are often based on
highly altered ecosystems where the degree of
human-induced change is unknown. In SEACHANGE, we propose
a structured and systematic approach to the reconstruction
of marine ecosystem baselines to quantify the impact of
anthropogenic cultural transitions on marine biodiversity
and ecosystem functioning. SEACHANGE will address two key
questions: 1) What was the nature of long-term changes in
prehistoric marine biodiversity and ecosystem functioning
over a 3000-year period in NW Europe and the degree of
human impact associated with major socioeconomic changes
across the Mesolithic-Neolithic boundary? 2) What has been
the scale and rate of marine biodiversity loss and changes
to ecosystem functioning as a result of fishing intensity
and marine habitat loss during the last 2000 years
(including the Industrial Transition) in the North Sea and
around Iceland, eastern Australia and the west Antarctic
Peninsula? To address these questions we will analyse: 1)
absolutely-dated annually-resolved bivalve shell series
(“sclerochronologies”); 2) marine sediment cores; 3)
archaeological midden (waste) materials including shells
and bones. We will date these samples precisely and
undertake zooarchaeological and palaeoecological, stable
isotope geochemical and environmental DNA/DNA
metabarcoding analyses. We will compare the data with
historical and archival sources, and we will generate
numerical ecosystem simulations. We will identify how
depleted the current marine environment is compared with
that before large scale human impact and what measures are
needed, and how long will it take, for marine biodiversity
to recover.
COMFORT: Our common future ocean in the Earth system –
quantifying coupled cycles of carbon, oxygen, and nutrients
for determining and achieving safe operating spaces with
respect to tipping points
The Horizon 2020 project, led from Bergen, aims to provide a
better understanding of and advice regarding tipping points
and safe operating spaces within the marine realm under
anthropogenic change. Within this we will be looking for
evidence of tipping points within high resolution
palaeoenvironmental records from the shelf seas spanning the
industrialised era, and to use simple modelling approaches to
attribute the change to possible drivers.
OMG The Southern Ocean Bias: Observing and Modelling trace
Gases to explore the Southern Ocean temperature Bias
This is a NERC funded Industrial Met Office CASE PhD student project to explore to what degree marine trace gas emissions can help explain the Southern Ocean warm bias in models, and more broadly understand the impact of Southern Ocean natural aerosols on the climate system.
Climate impacts on corals
This is a University of Exeter - University of Queensland
jointly funded studentship to attemt to move towards
mechanistic modelling of the impacts of 21st century climate
change on tropical corals.
CURB CO2: Carbon Uptake Revisited – Biases Corrected using Ocean Observations
When we emit carbon dioxide (CO2) to the
atmosphere through industrial activity, only around half of
that CO2 remains in the atmosphere, with the
remainder being taken up approximately equally through
photosynthesis by plants on land and being absorbed by the
oceans. These anthropogenic CO2 'sinks' are
essentially saving us from a large part of the global warming
that we would otherwise be experiencing. New evidence suggests
that our estimates of how this fraction of CO2 that
stays in the atmosphere is changing, and will continue to
change, may be too high, meaning that there may be more hope
that we can prevent atmospheric CO2 concentrations
rising too high than was previously thought.
Whilst we can estimate how much CO2 we are
presently emitting, and can measure the concentration of CO2
in the atmosphere, and therefore work out how strong these
sinks are (i.e. how much CO2 they are taking out of
the atmosphere), we must calculate how this number will change
in the future if we are to determine how much CO2
we can emit as a society without exceeding dangerous CO2
concentrations in the atmosphere. This project aims to give us
a better understanding of what this future change in the
fraction of CO2 staying in the atmosphere is, by
correcting a bias we have identified in the models we use to
make these projections.
We make projections of how the land and ocean CO2
sinks may change in the future using increasingly
comprehensive Earth System Models (which are climate modes
which also contain a representation of additional processes
such as the carbon cycle). While these models are the best
possible tools we have to simulate future climate change, they
are still far from perfect. We have shown that in the North
Atlantic, which is the most intense ocean CO2 sink,
these models underestimate how quickly the CO2
absorption is increasing, and have identified what the models
are doing wrong. This project will extend this work from the
North Atlantic to the full ocean, and by correcting for the
biases that cause the models to under-predict this change,
produce new and improved future estimates of ocean CO2
absorption.
One we have our improved estimates of future changes in the
strength of the ocean carbon sink, we will account for how the
land CO2 sink responds to this, and produce a set
of new scenarios describing how much CO2 can be
emitted through human activity through time if we are not to
exceed the atmospheric CO2 concentrations linked to
global warming of 1.5 to 2 degrees C above preindustrial
temperatures.
The overarching aim of this project is to provide UK and
international governments with the best possible impartial
information from which they can plan how best to work towards
the global warming targets (the 'Paris Agreement') set at the
Paris Climate Conference in December 2015.
CURB CO2 is a one year NERC-BEIS funded project.
Robust Spatial Projections of Real-World Climate Change
Robust Spatial Projections of Real-World Climate Change is a four year project led by Mat Collins (Exeter, CEMPS), including partners from Exeter, BAS, UEA, Reading, Oxford and the Met Office, aiming to bring together dynamical and statistical approaches to produce 'real-world' climate projections, rather than model-world climate projections. Within this Halloran's group will be trying to understand the sensitivity of the climate system (and specifically land-sea temperature contrasts) to marine emissions of biologically-produced trace gasses.
Climate of the LAst Millennium (CLAM): An Integrated Data-Model Approach to Reconstruct and Interpret Annual Variability in North Atlantic Circulation
CLAM is a 3 year £750k NERC Standard Grant collaboration between Cardiff (lead), Exeter and Bangor, attempting to reconstruct and understand annual to centennial variability in surface North Atlantic circulation over the past millennium. CLAM aima to utilise a network of robustly calibrated and verified absolutely dated sclerochronological proxy archives from NW Scotland, N. Iceland and the Gulf of Maine, together with high-resolution climate models, to investigate the mechanisms and forcings driving variability in the circulation patterns of the North Atlantic over the last millennium.
RAGNARoCC: Radiatively active gases from the North Atlantic Region and Climate Change
RAGNARoCC
is a Large (£2M) NERC funded directed program.
The project's object is to understand how large, and how
variable, are sources and sinks of greenhouse gases to the
atmosphere from the North Atlantic. We aim to be able to
describe how these have changed in the recent past and how
they will change in the future under different climate
scenarios. Most effort will be concentrated on carbon dioxide,
and we will deliver a comprehensive budgeting of natural and
anthropogenic components of the carbon cycle in the North
Atlantic and understanding of why the air-sea fluxes of CO2
vary regionally, seasonally and multi-annually. Observations
of CH4 and N2O and estimates of their regional fluxes will
additionally be made. We, in collaboration with our partner
institutions in Europe and the US, will undertake surface
measurements of CO2 air-sea fluxes made from networks of
voluntary observing ships and at fixed sites. These will be
synthesised with observations from hydrographic sections of
the interior carbon content. We will thus obtain accurate
estimates of the uptake, present storage, and net transport of
anthropogenic carbon, and variability in the natural uptake
and release of atmospheric CO2 by the N. Atlantic. In parallel
with direct estimates made from these observations, forward
and inverse models (of both atmospheric and oceanic kinds) of
these fluxes will be developed.
ABC is a collaboration between the National Oceanography
Centre (NOC), University of Exeter's Department of Geography,
University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science,
Newcastle University, the University of East Anglia and
Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML).
Within this project we are bringing together observational and
modelling (box modelling and CMIP5 analysis) techniques to
mechanistically understand recent observed variability.
ABC Fluxes
ABC Fluxes is a Large (£1.2M) NERC funded directed program
which makes up part of the NERC RAPID
programme.
The North Atlantic Ocean plays a pivotal role in the global
carbon cycle, by storing carbon released into the atmosphere
when fossil fuels are burned, and by supporting the sinking
flux of organic matter. Our understanding of how horizontal
oceanic fluxes in the subtropics contribute to these processes
is largely based on shipboard expeditions which occur every 5
years at 24N. Sampling at that interval is insufficient to
resolve and understand the role that horizontal transfers play
in regulating these processes.
Detailed time-series of physical properties at 26.5N from
moored instruments suggest that variability in these fluxes
will be occurring on a range of timescales. Once this
variability is measured, it is almost inevitable that we will
modify our understanding of the role the North Atlantic
subtropical gyre plays in the global carbon cycle.
In ABC fluxes we will address these issues by deploying new chemical sensors and samplers across the Atlantic at 26.5N. We will use the data they provide to calculate time-series of fluxes of nutrient and inorganic carbon, including carbon released to the atmosphere by mans activities, across 26.5N. We will adopt a hierarchical approach, successively using existing observations, then new oxygen observations and ultimately direct observations of the carbon and nutrients, in order to identify the added value each successive stage of our programme provides.
We will interpret our direct flux calculations as
contributions to the North Atlantic budget in conjunction with
other observations and models, to assess how oceanic fluxes
control the strength and variability of the role the North
Atlantic plays in the global carbon cycle.
ABC is a collaboration between the National Oceanography
Centre (NOC), University of Exeter's Department of Geography,
University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science,
and Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML).
Mollusks 2 Models
Mollusks2Models is a NERC funded CASE PhD student project to
bring together annually resolved palaeoclimate reconstructions
from bivalves with shelf-sea modelling. The project aims to
deliver new understanding about the climate drivers of
ecosystem change in the North West European shelf seas.
ImageFlow
We have recently been awarded a large NERC capital bid to
work with the manufacturers to build the world's first
polarising imaging
flow cytometer. We will be using this piece of equipment
to develop high-throughput, high-resolution palaeoclimate
reconstruction techniques to facilitate the brining together
of marine and lacustrine palaeoclimate research with future
climate modelling.