Develop and apply a novel CO2 proxy to reconstruct the past and inform the future.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a potent greenhouse gas and its concentration in the atmosphere plays an important role in our climate system. Variations in atmospheric CO2 are a key driver of climate change. However, undisputed data on atmospheric CO2 levels derived from ice-cores currently only exist for the last 800,000 years, a fraction of geological time. For most of geological time, we rely on indirect "proxy" methods, and the exact value of atmospheric CO2 levels during key periods of Earth's history is heavily debated.
The focus of this exciting PhD project is to develop and apply novel methods to accurately quantify ancient atmospheric CO2 levels. The results from this project will revolutionize our understanding of the role of CO2 in driving climate and may help to better predict the future impact of anthropogenic climate change.
The first part of the project revolves around quantifying CO2 using an array of biomarkers across the last 800,000 years to validate the CO2 proxies against the available ice core record of atmospheric CO2. The second part of the project will involve quantifying CO2 during key-periods of climatic change during the last ~100 million years using marine sediments collected by the IODP program.