This project will reconstruct regional Late Pleistocene and Holocene climates using stalagmites from southeastern Europe and the Middle East, and it and may offer opportunities to collaborate with archaeological colleagues investigating the rôle of climate change in the development of early civilisations. Speleothems are a very important resource for documenting the large fluctuations in global climate that have occurred over the past 500,000 years. For example, high resolution analyses of fluctuations in the oxygen and carbon isotope compositions of speleothems have been instrumental in identifying significant shifts in regional climate patterns, such as the East Asian Monsoon and North Atlantic Oscillation. High precision uranium-thorium dating allows these records to be confidently correlated with other proxy archives, such as ice cores and marine cores and indeed, speleothem U-Th dating is so precise that it has been used to refine the chronologies of other long climate records. Speleothems in Mediterranean climate zones can be sensitive indicators of variations in rainfall amount, a crucial parameter for sustaining agriculture, social structures and urban development. Pre-Holocene specimens may contribute to the continuing debate about the extent and persistence of wet and dry phases during the last glacial period for which there is a wealth of conflicting geological evidence. A variety of techniques will be used to recover palaeoclimatic data including high resolution micromill sampling for oxygen and carbon isotope measurements on our mass spectrometers, uranium-thorium dating, scanning electron microscopy, XRD and thin section petrography, and trace element analyses using laser technology. The project will involve training in all these techniques, as well as in data interpretation. Some preliminary analytical work has been carried out on a few specimens but much more detailed development and interpretation are now required. A first class or good upper second class honours degree in a relevant scientific discipline is required. An understanding of the nature and mechanisms of Late Pleistocene global climatic change would be desirable, and some knowledge of stable isotope behaviour in the global hydrological cycle would be advantageous although not essential.

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Fleitmann, D. et al., 2009. Timing and climatic impact of Greenland interstadials recorded in stalagmited from northern Turkey. Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L19707