Over the last 200 years human activity has increased CO2 in the atmosphere by around 40%, roughly 25% of which has been absorbed by the oceans. This has increased oceanic acidity by around 30%. Many studies have shown negative effects of lowered pH on biological functions in a wide range of marine animals and algae. There is widespread concern from scientists, policymakers and conservationists over the effects this change is having, and will increasingly have, on marine life and on the stability of marine ecosystems. This is especially so for species with high requirements for CaCO3 to make skeletons (Royal Society 2005, IPCC 2007). There is thus a need to understand better how marine species can cope with lowered pH, how those currently living in environments of different pH are adapted to those conditions, and how these groups have coped with varying pH in the past both since industrialisation and in deeper geological time. The best way to address questions of this type is to study a marine group that is heavily calcified, has widespread distributions in sites of different pH and has a long and well represented fossil record. In this respect living articulated brachiopods are, if not the best candidate group, then certainly one of the best. They inhabit all of the world's oceans from the poles to the tropics, and from the deep sea to the intertidal. They are possibly the most calcium carbonate dependent on Earth. Over 90% of their dry mass (in some species over 97%) is accounted for by calcareous skeleton. They also have one of the best fossil records in terms of representation and abundance over long geological periods of any marine animal group. There are excellent museum collections for this group, including repeat samples of the same species over the last 150 years and extensive collections at the family level for several major geological periods from single sites. They are, therefore ideal for investigating questions associated with changing environmental pH. We will use up to date SEM and ion probe techniques to quantify articulated brachiopod skeletal characteristics (shell thickness, primary & secondary layer thickness, crystal morphology, major & minor elemental composition) to address questions in four main areas. Firstly we will investigate the effects of varying pH in current environments by sampling populations of key species living in sites of different pH. Terebratulina retusa is distributed from the Mediterranean to Svalbard, with populations living in sealochs and harbours where pH is lower than offshore. Calloria inconspicua inhabits a similar range of sites around New Zealand. We will sample populations living in different pH conditions and analyse their shells. We will also monitor pH in the areas sampled for at least a year. This will allow us to identify skeletal responses to being raised in reduced pH in the natural environment. Secondly we will quantify changes in skeletons that have occurred since the industrial revolution, when CO2 levels have been consistently rising. Both our key species have good museum collections from given localities covering the last 50 years, and T. retusa collections date back to 1870 in the BM Nat Hist. Collections of the Antarctic L. uva also date back to the 1960's. We plan to exploit these collections to identify skeletal changes over the recent past as oceanic CO2 has risen. Thirdly we will analyse shell characteristics in Articulated brachiopods from different geological periods when CO2 levels in the environment were markedly different from today. This will allow evolutionary scale responses to be addressed. Finally we will hold our key species in culture systems with altered pH conditions and assess changes in skeletal composition and structure. These approaches should provide a very good understanding of how marine species have and can respond to acidification over as wide a range of time and spatial scales as possible.

The motivation for the proposed study is the difficulty in managing water abstraction in the absence of good information about the degree of charge of aquifers, the growing consensus that groundwater recharge will diminish in arid and semiarid areas in sub-Saharan and western Africa, and the ever-increasing pressure on aquifers from increased abstraction. The aim of the proposed work is to determine the feasibility of using a NERC-developed instrument (ApRES) to aid the management of water resources in arid and semi-arid regions by allowing water-table depths to be monitored without recourse to boreholes. The challenge has both technical and societal aspects. The Autonomous phase-sensitive Radio Echo Sounder (ApRES) was jointly developed by the British Antarctic Survey and University College London to monitor the changing thickness of the floating portion of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Lightweight, robust and relatively inexpensive, ApRES was designed to be deployed on an ice sheet for a year or more, withstanding the harsh conditions of the Antarctic winter. The problem of detecting the changing depth of the base of an ice sheet is essentially the same as that of detecting the depth of the water table in an otherwise dry environment. ApRES can therefore potentially be used as relatively inexpensive (compared with boreholes) method for monitoring the depth of the water table, providing a tool to assist in the management of water abstraction. Our choice of country for this study is Morocco. Morocco boasts a useful range of soil types, climatic conditions, and water table depths. Its many boreholes provide the necessary ground truth by offering an independent measure of the depth of the water table. A short pilot study was undertaken in Morocco in March 2017, funded through a NERC ODA Innovation pump-prime grant, and locally facilitated by the partners on the present proposal. The results were promising. Several sites were visited, with varying water table depths, primarily to find a suitable location for a multi-hour deployment. The instrument was able to detect the water table at most of the sites and was able to monitor its changing depth over a 6-hour (overnight) trial. The promising results from the pilot now prompts the next step - a comprehensive study in Morocco, alongside our Moroccan partners, to determine more precisely the envelope of capability of the instrument, and to reduce impediments to its use in monitoring groundwater depth: ease of use, robustness, cost. In the proposed study visits to different field sites in Morocco will allow the utility of ApRES to be assessed for a range of soil types, soil moisture contents, water table depths, local conditions (urban/rural) and seasons (wet/dry). The instrument and antennas will be scrutinised to see where costs can be reduced and what hardening will be needed to deal with the non-polar conditions. Finally, the data-processing steps will be rationalised such that a non-expert could carry them out. The societal aspect of the challenge, how to ensure uptake of any new technique, will be addressed in two ways. An independently resourced, but parallel study that we have instigated (to be delivered by Development i-Teams in October and November 2017) will investigate how having the ability to monitor the discharge and recharge of aquifers in real time can be used to improve the sustainability of groundwater exploitation in water-scarce regions. Second, our project partners in Morocco will prepare an implementation pathways document to define how the technology could be rolled out in Morocco. Should the project that we are proposing here confirm the technical feasibility of using ApRES for ground water monitoring in arid regions, the outcomes of the i-Teams study and the implementation pathways report will put us in a strong position to take the project forward to the next level of application, both within Morocco and beyond.

Large blooms of single celled phytoplankton which make their shells out of silica, the diatoms, are responsible for transporting the majority of carbon from the surface ocean to the deep ocean. Changes in the productivity of diatoms therefore control how much carbon dioxide resides in the atmosphere and how much is conveyed and stored in the deep ocean. The aim of this proposal is to investigate the role of diatoms in driving changing climate on long and short timescales using a characteristic and novel signature of diatom productivity, namely the d30Si. Our intention is to find out whether major changes in diatom productivity which would have enhanced the draw-down of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the deep ocean, during the last ~ 50 Myrs could have contributed to Earth's transition from a greenhouse world with no or little ice, to the modern ice house world with the current bipolar ice sheets. Further, we aim to build on some preliminary evidence that diatoms are flourishing with global warming and find out whether diatom productivity could act as a negative feedback on anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide. As glaciers retreat around Antarctica and the meltwater flux increases into this highly productive coastal zone, there is the potential for increased input of nutrients and also enhanced stability of the water column, each of which can lead to enhanced diatom productivity. We shall construct a record of diatom productivity, again using d30Si, over the last 500 years in rapidly accumulating sediments of the Antarctic Peninsula. By targeting the last 500 years, our analyses will capture the last glacial advance and recovery from the Little Ice Age period (ending 1850) of the Holocene and allow us to test whether diatoms consistently increase productivity as glaciers retreat, and assess whether the diatom response to the anthropogenically forced glacial retreat is unprecedented on this timescale.

The thermosphere is the uppermost layer of our atmosphere at the edge of space (85 to 1000 km altitude). Within this region orbit thousands of satellites worth billions of pounds that provide essential modern services including satnav, satcomms, and remote sensing. There are also many thousands more orbiting pieces of man-made space debris which present a significant risk to operational satellites because of the chance of collision. We have now passed a tipping point where the increase in debris from collisions exceeds losses, leading to a net growth of the space debris population and thus ever-increasing risk of collisions. Short- and long-term predictions of satellite and debris trajectories are vital to avoid the destruction of satellites in low-Earth orbit. A major factor limiting factor is knowing the density of the thermosphere, which can vary by up to 800% during extreme times. The variability is due to effects in near-Earth space from disturbances on the Sun, collectively called space weather. In the polar regions, where there is the greatest concentration of satellites, the largest uncertainties in thermospheric density arise from "Joule" heating. This is caused by collisions between electrically-charged and neutral particles in the thermosphere, driven by space weather. Crucially, we have yet to properly understand when and where Joule heating will occur and how predictable it is. Accurate models and prediction of Joule heating are vital to safeguard the space assets on which modern society depends. In this project we will develop a better understanding of Joule heating by analysing more than a decade of data from two major international polar instrument networks. We will use a statistical method developed in meteorology called Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis, which is capable of uncovering the underlying patterns in a large, noisy data set. In this way we will both resolve the Joule heating in unprecedented detail and separate it into patterns which depend to greater or lesser degrees on the solar sources of space weather. Since these sources can be observed before they cause space weather at Earth, this will allow us to quantify the limits of predictability of the Joule heating. By then assessing the relationship between the Joule heating and satellite trajectories, this will allow us to describe which orbital paths are most at risk from space weather.

Flooding is the deadliest and most costly natural hazard on the planet, affecting societies across the globe. Nearly one billion people are exposed to the risk of flooding in their lifetimes and around 300 million are impacted by floods in any given year. The impacts on individuals and societies are extreme: each year there are over 6,000 fatalities and economic losses exceed US$60 billion. These problems will become much worse in the future. There is now clear consensus that climate change will, in many parts of the globe, cause substantial increases in the frequency of occurrence of extreme rainfall events, which in turn will generate increases in peak flood flows and therefore flood vast areas of land. Meanwhile, societal exposure to this hazard is compounded still further as a result of population growth and encroachment of people and key infrastructure onto floodplains. Faced with this pressing challenge, reliable tools are required to predict how flood hazard and exposure will change in the future. Existing state-of-the-art Global Flood Models (GFMs) are used to simulate the probability of flooding across the Earth, but unfortunately they are highly constrained by two fundamental limitations. First, current GFMs represent the topography and roughness of river channels and floodplains in highly simplified ways, and their relatively low resolution inadequately represents the natural connectivity between channels and floodplains. This restricts severely their ability to predict flood inundation extent and frequency, how it varies in space, and how it depends on flood magnitude. The second limitation is that current GFMs treat rivers and their floodplains essentially as 'static pipes' that remain unchanged over time. In reality, river channels evolve through processes of erosion and sedimentation, driven by the impacts of diverse environmental changes (e.g., climate and land use change, dam construction), and leading to changes in channel flow conveyance capacity and floodplain connectivity. Until GFMs are able to account for these changes they will remain fundamentally unsuitable for predicting the evolution of future flood hazard, understanding its underlying causes, or quantifying associated uncertainties. To address these issues we will develop an entirely new generation of Global Flood Models by: (i) using Big Data sets and novel methods to enhance substantially their representation of channel and floodplain morphology and roughness, thereby making GFMs more morphologically aware; (ii) including new approaches to representing the evolution of channel morphology and channel-floodplain connectivity; and (iii) combining these developments with tools for projecting changes in catchment flow and sediment supply regimes over the 21st century. These advances will enable us to deliver new understanding on how the feedbacks between climate, hydrology, and channel morphodynamics drive changes in flood conveyance and future flooding. Moreover, we will also connect our next generation GFM with innovative population models that are based on the integration of satellite, survey, cell phone and census data. We will apply the coupled model system under a range of future climate, environmental and societal change scenarios, enabling us to fully interrogate and assess the extent to which people are exposed, and dynamically respond, to evolving flood hazard and risk. Overall, the project will deliver a fundamental change in the quantification, mapping and prediction of the interactions between channel-floodplain morphology and connectivity, and flood hazard across the world's river basins. We will share models and data on open source platforms. Project outcomes will be embedded with scientists, global numerical modelling groups, policy-makers, humanitarian agencies, river basin stakeholders, communities prone to regular or extreme flooding, the general public and school children.