Fully funded PhD studentships

Human Geography

We accept applications for doctoral study in all areas of our human geography research. In 2012, 2-3 PhD studentships will be offered based on the excellence of individual candidate applications.

Start date: 1st October 2012 (flexible)

Closing date for applications: 17th February 2012

Contact: Dr Julie MacLeavy

Advanced Quantitative Methods

Prospective students are also eligible to apply for AQM studentships that could be held within the School of Geographical Sciences.

Start date: 1st October 2012 (flexible)

Closing date for applications: 17th February 2012 (to be confirmed)

Further information available

Contact: Professor Fiona Steele

Understanding and testing Reconstructions of Past Ocean Circulation

The North Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is one of the most important features of the Climate System and has a strong influence on European climates. Modelling future changes to this circulation has some considerable uncertainty and one way of constraining these projections is to evaluate whether these models can also simulate past changes. The project will develop new tools to perform detailed model-data comparisons of the ocean circulation and hence help to constrain future predictions.

Start date: 1st October 2012 (flexible)

Closing date for applications: 17th February 2012

Further information available

Contact: Professor Paul Valdes

Modelling Permafrost: Past, Present and Future

Permafrost is a major feature of the Arctic region and, globally is a significant store of organic carbon. In a warming climate, permafrost will thaw, and the resulting microbial decomposition of previously frozen organic carbon is potentially one of the most significant feedbacks from terrestrial ecosystems to the atmosphere. This project is to improve prediction of permafrost thawing and understand the consequences for soil biogeochemistry and CH4 emissions. Specifically, the aim of the project is to develop a capability to model permafrost evolution.

Start date: 1st October 2012 (flexible)

Closing date for applications: 17th February 2012

Further information available

Contact: Professor Paul Valdes

Laboratory and numerical simulation of organic carbon degradation and greenhouse gas production beneath ice sheets

Once thought to be devoid of life, the basal regions of glaciers and ice sheets are now known to be viable habitats for microorganisms. The activity of these organisms within the deep sub-surface designates ice sheets as important regulators of Earth’s global biogeochemical cycles [Wadham et al., 2010]. For example, microbial activity at the ice sheet bed produces runoff that is rich in labile dissolved organic carbon that may be important in sustaining downstream ecosystem productivity [Hood et al., 2009], and the activity of anaerobic micro-organisms produces methane gas from organic carbon in sediments [Boyd et al., 2010; Wadham et al., 2008]. There is considerable interest at present in the fate of organic carbon beneath ice sheets, and the magnitude of methane production during periods of glaciation. The field, experimental and numerical modelling work to underpin these assertions, however, is in its infancy.

Start date: 1st October 2012 (flexible)

Closing date for applications: 17th February 2012

Further information available

Contact: Dr Jemma Wadham

Evaluating the impact of organic carbon exported from the Greenland Ice Sheet on Arctic Ocean productivity

The Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) is the largest mass of ice in the Northern Hemisphere, contributing ~370 km3 of runoff annually to the Arctic Ocean. Recent modelling work suggests that runoff will increase by up to 100% over the next century, with consequent impacts on fluxes of sediment-bound and dissolved organic carbon and nutrients (N, P, Fe) from the ice sheet to the coastal ocean [Follmi et al., 2009; Hood et al., 2009]. This is likely to be very important since recent work has shown that a high proportion of the dissolved organic carbon (DOC) present in glacial runoff is labile and is important in sustaining the productivity of downstream ecosystems [Hood et al., 2009]. It may also be supplemented by particulate organic carbon (POC) in suspended sediments. This studentship will be part of a wider NERC-funded project aimed at characterising the hydrology of the Greenland Ice Sheet. It aims to measure the export organic carbon (OC) in both the dissolved and solid phase from large land-terminating glaciers on the SW Greenland margin during the summer melt season.

Start date: 1st October 2012 (flexible)

Closing date for applications: 17th February 2012

Further information available

Contact:Dr Jemma Wadham

Thermodynamics of biogeochemical processes under ice

This project will examine the limits to the types of biogeochemical reactions that can occur under ice masses that are imposed by chemical thermodynamics. The student will be expected to model the free energy changes of a spectrum of possible biogeochemical reactions that can occur beneath ice sheets, given a range of redox potentials and pH, with a view to understanding whether or not there are physic-chemical barriers to certain reactions taking place. The reactions we are principally interested in are the enhanced chemical weathering of silicates, which has the potential to influence cryospheric draw down of atmospheric CO2, and the production of the nutrients, Si, Fe, N and P, which may fertilise coastal waters in the poles.

Start date: 1st October 2012 (flexible)

Closing date for applications: 17th February 2012

Further information available

Contact: Professor Martyn Tranter

Sea-levels, tides and radionuclides: Salt marshes of the Severn Estuary

It is well-recognised that the coastal landscape of the Severn Estuary is an extremely valuable and unique resource, but vulnerable to a host of likely impacts related to sea-level change, future energy projects and changing coastal management practice. Historical evidence of coastal dynamics and environmental impact are required to plan for sustainable management of this coastline. Much of the evidence for salt-marsh dynamical response to changing environmental conditions is hosted within the sediments themselves, as is the history of changing sea level, sedimentation rates, and trace metal and contaminant accumulation from nuclear power sources. We intend to explore these issues in this PhD project.

Start date: 1st October 2012 (flexible)

Closing date for applications: 17th February 2012

Further information available

Contact: Dr David Richards

Developing a novel UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) helicopter platform for very high resolution environmental monitoring of catchment processes

Recent advances in remote sensing and geographic information has led the way for the development of hyperspectral sensors and cloud scanning LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging). Both these technologies can be used to sense environmental processes and capture detailed spatial information, they are often deployed in ground, aircraft and satellite based systems. This project involves developing the engineering solutions and post processing techniques needed to realise an ultra high resolution helicopter based environmental sensing platform which can fly at lower altitudes than aircraft systems and can be deployed more frequently. We shall trial this technology (the only one of its kind in the UK) on a range of environmental sensing problems that would benefit from such complex and detailed data.

Start date: 1st October 2012 (flexible)

Closing date for applications: 17th February 2012

Further information available

Contact: Dr Jim Freer

Measuring discharge from space in ungauged basins using SWOT

Despite the importance of freshwater for life and uncertainties over the affect climate change is having on its abundance and dynamics, the spatial and temporal variability of this critical resource is not well understood due to a lack of suitable data (Alsdorf et al., 2007). With no foreseeable global scale expansion of ground based monitoring, remote sensing from space offers the only practical means of acquiring this knowledge in many un-gauged locations. To try to solve this problem NASA and CNES are funding SWOT, the Surface Water Ocean Topography mission, which will for the first time directly measure water heights from space with complete global coverage at ~100m ground resolution every 10 days to centimetric accuracy. look for novel ways to correct for the missing topographic information in discharge estimation. This PhD will therefore make a major contribution to the algorithms to be used to estimate global discharge from SWOT data.

Start date: 1st October 2012 (flexible)

Closing date for applications: 17th February 2012

Further information available

Contact: Professor Paul Bates

Investigating the stability of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) is ten times larger than either its western neighbour (WAIS) or that which covers Greenland [Alley et al., 2005]. The WAIS is believed to be inherently unstable and to have contributed significantly to sea level rise during the Pleistocene [Bamber et al., 2009; Scherer et al., 1998]. [Barrett et al., 1992; Sugden et al., 1995]. Parts of the EAIS possess bedrock geometry that is believed to make its western neighbour unstable (Fig 1). Until recently, however, relatively large tracts of East Antarctica have lacked adequate information on bedrock elevation. The aim of this project is to use new information on the bedrock geometry of the EAIS to investigate how much of it might satisfy the marine ice sheet instability hypothesis and to compare this analysis with paleo evidence for ice sheet variations in East Antarctica.

Start date: 1st October 2012 (flexible)

Closing date for applications: 17th February 2012

Further information available

Contact: Professor Jonathan Bamber

The changing dynamics of ocean carbon cycling through Earth history

The ocean is awash with dissolved organic matter (DOM) – enough to almost double atmospheric CO2 if oxidized and released to the atmosphere all at once. Could this invisible carbon store have played a key role in the past and help explain some of the most extreme climatic and global extinction events to have occurred in Earth history? This project will develop a unique model representation of the ocean DOM cycle and use it to explore the dynamical role of DOM in the marine carbon cycle and climate system, both past and future.

Start date: 1st October 2012 (flexible)

Closing date for applications: 17th February 2012

Further information available

Contact: Dr Sandra Arndt

Microbial biogeography and metabolic diversity in the cryosphere

Recent studies of microbes in polar regions have revealed higher diversities of viruses, bacteria, and protists, in marked contrast to the well documented pattern of decreasing biological diversity in macrofauna and flora with increasing latitudes. There are just a few studies of microbial diversity in glaciers (both surface and subglacial habitats), largely based on culture-dependent, microscopic observations and/or PCR-based approaches. This Studentship aims to employ a metagenomic and meta-transcriptomic approaches using “next generation” sequencing technologies, in combination with bioinformatics to generate new and uniquely integrated datasets of genetic and functional diversity, including microbial adaptations to extreme conditions and metabolic pathways in glacial ecosystems.

Start date: 1st October 2012 (flexible)

Closing date for applications: 17th February 2012

Further information available

Contact: Dr Alex Anesio

PAPARAZZI - A global and near real-time service of flood parameters from radar satellites

Standard FNR (Luxembourg’s National Research Fund) AFR contract (~2300 Euro/month net salary). For more information, see the AFR website (EU and UK nationals).

The candidate will be a registered, self-funded PhD student at the University of Bristol. He/she will be fully-funded from Luxembourg’s National Research Fund and will therefore spend 2/3 of the time at the CRP-GL in Luxembourg and the remaining time with the Hydrology Group at the School of Geographical Sciences.

Project: With recent and past floods having devastating effects on our lives and economies on a worldwide scale, there is a clear need to provide near-real time data on flood parameters more routinely and on a global scale. Providing such data operationally would be a giant leap towards supporting ongoing efforts in operational flood monitoring and forecasting. This project aims to look at ways of developing efficient deliveries of data from radar satellites to support flood risk mitigation worldwide and aid advancing flood inundation modeling from space.

Start date: 1st July 2012

Closing date for applications: 30th March 2012

Further information available

MEDGATE - EU Marie Curie ITN

An EU-funded Marie Curie Initial Training Network to reconstruct the flow patterns between the Mediterranean and Atlantic 5-10 million years ago, when ~6% of the world's sea salt was precipitated in the Mediterranean.

There are 9 PhD positions available and 1 post-doctoral position.

The two positions based in Bristol are:

• Modelling the impact of Late Miocene Mediterranean Outflow Water on ocean circulation in the Atlantic
• Assessing the impact of exchange on Mediterranean temperature and salinity

Start date: 1st July - 1st September 2012

Closing date for applications: 1st March 2012.

The interviews for all positions will be held in Utrecht on 17-18th April 2012.

For further information, please see the MEDGATE website.