Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

This Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) funded full-time post is available from 1st December 2026 on a fixed term basis for 12 months (latest possible start date is 1st April 2027).

The starting salary will be from £44,352 on Grade F, depending on knowledge, skills and experience.

The Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy wishes to recruit a Postdoctoral Research Fellow to participate in an exciting new project called Ocean Carbon Soundscapes (OCS) to better understand the variability of ocean carbon fluxes using a novel acoustic method and cutting-edge artificial intelligence.

Ocean Carbon Soundscapes addresses one of the major challenges in marine science today: improving our ability to quantify and understand the ocean carbon sink. The ocean buffers climate change by absorbing significant amounts of atmospheric carbon. Marine life is a fundamental driver of this uptake: plants in the surface ocean convert carbon into organic matter through photosynthesis. This organic carbon eventually reaches deep ocean sediments as sinking dead plant and animal material, or as faecal pellets—collectively known as marine snow.

Once deposited, it can remain stored for hundreds to thousands of years. However, the amount of carbon sequestered as marine snow—and, crucially, its variability across space and time—is poorly understood. This knowledge gap stems from limited observations and shortcomings in measurement techniques.

The primary method for measuring sinking organic carbon in the ocean is sediment traps, which typically collect samples averaged over a month. However, recent studies indicate that ocean carbon fluxes are dominated by short-lived, high-magnitude burst events that sediment traps fail to resolve. These bursts may also be vital for deep‑sea communities. Without capturing these sub‑daily, critical burst events, environmental drivers and ecological impacts of ocean carbon flux cannot be reliably assessed, limiting our ability to predict future carbon export.

OCS will address this challenge.

Sediment traps are commonly deployed with acoustic current meters that work by assessing the frequency shift of sound pulses reflected from particles suspended in the water, and record measurements on hourly timescales. In a pilot study, we have shown that the amplitude of the acoustic back scatter - normally considered a byproduct - can be used to partition monthly sediment‑trap measurements into hourly observations, revealing fine‑scale variability.

With a vast amount of legacy acoustic current data available globally, our method has the potential to transform how we quantify highly resolved biological carbon distributions and understand the processes driving ocean carbon storage. However, translating any acoustic back scatter to a time series of sinking organic carbon, is complex, characterised by many variables and strong spatial and temporal dependencies. Cutting‑edge artificial intelligence (AI) tools are needed to unravel these connections.

Our key aims are: 1. Collate a global legacy data bank of coincident acoustic back scatter and sediment trap data, and use state‑of‑the‑art AI to identify robust relationships that link them;
2. Apply these relationships to produce high‑resolution (sub‑daily) carbon flux time series and investigate burst events; 3. Use advanced AI to explore the use of environmental drivers to strengthen back scatter‑carbon flux relationships and bypass the need for coincident sediment‑trap measurements;
4. Disseminate results, tools, and datasets to end‑users.

Ocean Carbon Soundscapes is a partnership between University of Exeter, British Antarctic Survey, National Oceanography Centre and Nortek…