PhD in Environmental Science

Over the last century, the High Arctic has experienced rapid warming, with the Arctic warming four times as fast the global average since 1979. This has resulted in major impacts to Arctic ecosystems. Lakes are especially sensitive sentinels of such environmental change, responding to climate change directly through changing heat budgets and indirectly to changing catchment stability, hydrology, vegetation and atmospheric deposition, affecting nutrient, sediment and pollutant flux (e.g. Hg, POPs). However, because the Arctic remains so sparsely monitored, documenting such changes and their impact is challenging. Well-dated lake sediments provide an excellent archive of environmental change that offers a long-term perspective on lake-catchment dynamics and integrate changes over the lake-landscape system. Understanding the dynamics of such change is critical to determine the extent of anthropogenic impacts in the High Arctic, provides a palaeoenvironmental context for High Arctic archaeology over the Holocene and delivers fundamental knowledge for forecasting environmental change across the wider Arctic region. This PhD will explore the sediment records of lakes in the ice-free margins of north-east Greenland (~80°N) using diatoms and other proxies to investigate environmental change over both shorter (Anthropocene) and longer (Holocene/Interglacial) timescales, from lakes that lie both above and below the local marine limit.