IODP Expedition 507: Glaciers, Landscapes, Climates, and Ecosystems of the North Sea (GLACE-NS)

Talk Summary:

IODP³ Expedition 507 (GLACE-NS) will investigate how climate, environments and glaciation have shaped the North Sea Basin over the past ~3 million years. By recovering a long sedimentary record from beneath the seafloor, the expedition aims to reconstruct major changes in European ice sheets, landscapes, climate, and ecosystems through the late Cenozoic. The work will combine sedimentology, palaeontology, geochemistry, geophysics, and a range of chronological techniques to build a detailed history of environmental change. It will also explore how the North Sea evolved from a largely non-glacial basin into one repeatedly affected by major ice sheets. Together, these records will provide new insights into the sensitivity of northwest Europe to long-term climate change and the development of its modern landscapes and environments.

Brief bio:

After completing an undergraduate degree at Queen’s University Belfast and an MSc at the University of Sheffield, Andrew undertook a PhD in marine geology and geophysics at the University of Manchester. He then spent 3.5 years as a research fellow investigating the effectiveness of carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) in the North Sea, before returning to QUB as a Senior Lecturer. His research now spans marine environments from high to low latitudes, with a particular focus on reconstructing past oceanographic and environmental change. Alongside this, he works in applied geoscience, including offshore wind ground modelling and onshore geothermal energy. A major current focus is IODP Expedition 507, for which he is Chief Scientist. The expedition will recover approximately 1.2 km of sediment from the North Sea, providing an unprecedented record of around 3.3 million years of European environmental and climatic change and, for the first time, a long-term perspective on the evolution of the North Sea Basin.