Biography

Following an undergraduate degree at the University of Durham, Jacob started at Keele in 2020 as a master's student on the MSc in Geoscience Research programme. During this course he took leave to work as research technician (also at Keele), focusing on a separate project related to samples collected by IODP Expedition 382 and the tephrochronology of the Scotia Sea. Since then, Jacob has continued to research the Scotia Sea tephra record, first completing his master's in 2022, and subsequently being accepted onto a PhD programme directly following on his master's research, supervised by Drs Alix Cage and Ralf Gertisser.

Research and scholarship

Title: Southern Ocean Marine Tephrostratigraphies: integrating tephra-constrained Southern Ocean
and Antarctic records to investigate a warming world.

‘Iceberg Alley’, the main route by which Antarctic icebergs leave the continent, passes through the Scotia Sea, depositing in its path crucial evidence of Antarctic Ice Sheet evolution. The poor preservation of carbonate in the Scotia Sea hinders radiocarbon dating of this record, limiting our understanding of Antarctic ice-ocean dynamics. However, the Scotia Sea is surrounded by major volcanic centres, and the products of their eruptions (i.e., tephra) can provide widespread isochronous markers, that can be correlated between records to constrain the timing of events such as the Last Interglacial (~130-116 ka). However, the existing tephrostratigraphy of the Scotia Sea is limited to 35.4 ka. This project therefore aims to extend the tephrostratigraphy of the Scotia Sea using core samples collected during IODP Expedition 382, thus constraining the timing of the Last Interglacial in the Scotia Sea and potentially integrating the Scotia Sea palaeoclimate record into a tephrostratigraphic framework incorporating surrounding marine, terrestrial, and glacial records.

View Jacob's ResearchGate profile.

Publications

School of Geography, Geology and the Environment
William Smith Building
Keele University
Staffordshire
ST5 5BG