Project description

In this project, the PhD student will:

1) run the climate model of the MIT (MITgcm) together with additional models for continental ice and vegetation components. Boundary conditions, in particular palæogeography reconstructions and atmospheric CO2 content, will be obtained by the other groups in the Sinergia project;

2) search for multiple steady states and corresponding bifurcation diagrams at four time slices (Late Ordovician, Permian-Triassic Boundary, Barremian-Aptian Boundary and present day);

3) investigate the mechanisms that give rise to shifts between ‘icehouse/greenhouse’ regimes at such time slices;

4) compare with simulation results obtained using simplified climate models at the same time slices

5) estimate weathering and carbon cycle feedbacks at long time scales.

This work will rely on the Earth’s topographies in the geological past determined within the project, and will take into account information/outputs of other models used by the Sinergia team.

The student will be under the co-supervision of Dr. Maura Brunetti and Prof Jérôme Kasparian, both in the Group of Applied Physics and at the Institute for Environmental Sciences, and Dr. Christian Vérard at the Department of Earth Sciences in Geneva. He/she will collaborate closely with the Base-Top Earth Sinergia team composed of the supervisors, senior scientists from the different research groups, and the other PhD students.

The PhD position is fully funded for 4 years (based on an initial 1-year positive evaluation) starting October 1st, 2023.