Job Opportunities: Climate Change

Mike Risk riskmj at mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca
Thu Mar 22 11:05:04 EST 2001


   RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES: CLIMATE CHANGE/CORALS/FORAMINIFERA

     - McMaster University
     - Dalhousie University
     - University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM)
     - Bedford Institute of Oceanography (BIO)

We seek a number of Research Associates, Post-Doctoral Fellows and
graduate students (MSc and PhD) to work on records of recent and Holocene
climate change as recorded in the skeletons of deep-water corals and the
associated foraminiferal associations. This research will be supported by
a recently-awarded 5-year Strategic Grant, in addition to regular
operating grants held by the collaborants. In all phases, colleagues and
students will work in an interdisciplinary environment, interacting with
geochemists, sedimentologists, paleontologists, climate modellers and
oceanographers.

Initially, research will focus on aspects of thermohaline circulation off
the NE coast of North America, using samples taken by submersible and
donated by inshore fishers. Later, work will expand to include climate
records recorded in corals from other regions. Previous work has suggested
that climate and surface productivity records several centuries long may
be obtained, with at least annual precision.

Although individual researchers will move freely among the collaborating
institutions, interacting with all of the involved research groups, there
are focal points:

1. McMaster: coral records, growth patterns, correlation, d18O and Sr/Ca
paleothermometry. High-precision foram records in coeval sediments.
Contact Dr. M. J. Risk, School of Geography and Geology:
riskmj at mcmaster.ca.

2. UQAM: geochemical records of large-scale oceanographic change, using
stable isotopes, trace elements and U & Th series isotopes in deep
Labrador Sea corals for the reconstruction of thermohaline circulation
changes at decadal to millennial time scales. Contact Dr. Claude
Hillaire-Marcel: chm at uqam.ca.

3. Dalhousie/BIO: ecology of deep-water corals, implications of coral
forests as fish habitat, biological conservation, climate records from
forams, calibration with coral records, integration with numerical
modelling, fluctuations in the North Atlantic Oscillation. Contact Dr. D.
B. Scott:

We feel that the New Archive in deep-water corals is the tool we have been
waiting for, that critical information is available that will bear upon
GCM's, global change and fisheries management. Individuals connected with
this work are assured of an exciting research environment in one of the
few new fields in ocean research in years. Resumes and inquiries may be
sent to any of us: we will circulate all relevant files.

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