Pushing the Frontiers of Environmental Research
Sami Mikhail is the lead investigator on a grant entitled “Quantifying changes in biomass burial over geological time”. This 4-year project investigate what happens to sedimentary-hosted nitrogen when the crust melts? The goal is to quantitively assess how plate tectonics and changes in biomass burial have co-contributed to shaping Earth’s present-day environmental conditions, thus charting the co-evolution of Earth’s atmosphere, biosphere, and geosphere. This is an international project with team members from St Andrews (Eva Stüeken, Nick Gardiner, Paul Savage, Dick White) and abroad (Claire Bucholz, Caltech, USA; Chris Spencer, Queens, Canada; Ralf Halama, University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany).
James Rae is part of a grant led by folk at Cambridge entitled “A novel proxy for past ocean carbon concentration.” The project will explore a new way to reconstruct the total amount of carbon in the ocean - complementing the constraints on the speciation of that carbon which we get from pH. Combined with the constraints from James’ recent research activities, this should really nail down CO2 concentrations over the last 66 million years.