Postdoctoral Research Associate in Organic Geochemistry

The Department Durham Geography is a vibrant community of over 60 academic staff (approximately equally divided between physical and human geography), a graduate school of around 100 research and 40 taught postgraduate students and more than 750 undergraduates. The Department is well supported with technical staff, including a cartography unit, and administrative staff.

The most recent QS rankings for Geography placed Durham 12th overall in the world. The department is recurrently ranked in the top handful of programmes in the UK by various league tables; in 2021, we were ranked 2nd in The Times/Sunday Times Good University Guide and 6th in the Guardian University Guide. The Department was graded top for research power (quality weighted by volume) among UK geography departments in the most recent Research Excellence Framework exercise in 2014 and 3rd for iGPA (average score scaled by proportion of staff submitted). With 43% of work assessed as being in the highest category, it produced the largest number of world-leading (4*) publications in the country.

Our aim is to sustain and support hubs of leadership in geographical scholarship - broadly conceived. We will maintain our reputation for theoretical and conceptual innovation so that we are shaping and leading debates globally.

The Role

The Department of Geography at Durham University seeks to appoint a full-time Post-Doctoral Research Associate in Organic Geochemistry and Palaeoclimate to join the inter-disciplinary research team led by Professor Erin McClymont as part of the Leverhulme Trust-funded project "Unlocking evidence for Antarctic sea-ice evolution from a novel biological archive". The post is fixed term for 3 years. The overall Leverhulme Trust-funded project aims to reconstruct histories of Antarctic sea-ice ecosystems and environments from the Last Glacial Maximum to present, using a combination of geochemical and reconstructions of snow petrel diet, modern snow petrel observations and diet sampling, genetic evidence for changes to snow petrel diet and populations, and modelling sea ice ecosystems for the past, present and future. A parallel project funded by the European Research Council includes additional snow petrel observation work and climate/sea ice modelling. Across the two projects, the team includes 4 PhD researchers, 3 PDRAs, and investigators at both Durham University (Geography, Biosciences) and the British Antarctic Survey.

The overall aim of this PDRA position will be to reconstruct changes to snow petrel diet and sea-ice conditions from accumulated deposits of regurgitated stomach oils generated by snow petrels where they nest above the Antarctic ice sheet (McClymont et al., 2022, Climate of the Past Discussions, ). These stomach oil deposits (sometimes referred to as 'Antarctic mumiyo') can be tens of thousands of years old, and have previously been radiocarbon dated as a way of reconstructing ice sheet thinning histories. In this project, the PDRA will focus on the application of stable isotope and organic geochemistry (biomarker) analysis to identify and reconstruct key prey species contributions to snow petrel diet, and reconstruct changes in the sea ice environment through time. The PDRA will focus on characterising a range of lipids and fatty acids, and will undertake both bulk and compound-specific isotope analysis. The PDRA may also apply XRF analysis of bulk elemental composition to support the organic geochemistry work, and there is the potential to develop new proxies through amino acid or pigment analysis.