Climate and Environmental Physics is a division of the Physics Institute of the University of Bern. We are committed to understand the processes of Earth System on time scales from seasons to a million years.
Reconstructions of atmospheric CO2, marine biogeochemistry, and climate reveal a fascinating, yet still enigmatic, spectrum of variability. During the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, ice age cycles changed the periodicity from 41,000 to 100,000 years without a corresponding change in orbital forcing. CO2 jumps, which originate from a pulse-like CO2 release on centennial time scales, were recently detected, expanding the variability spectrum from glacial-interglacial and the well-known millennial-scale CO2 maxima. The PostDoc will investigate forcing-response sensitivities by vary-ing forcing mechanisms with a fixed periodicity in simulations with the Bern3D model. Glacial-interglacial simulations will be performed to elucidate the role of individual mechanisms on CO2 and multi-proxy evolution. The response of CO2 and ocean biogeochemistry to perturbations in freshwater or wind stress will be probed for different states of the model ocean. Model outcomes will be analyzed in the light of proxy data for a broad set of parameters, including carbon iso-topes, nutrients, oxygen, carbonate ion, preformed, remineralized, ideal age and dye tracers, noble gases, and isotopes of rare earth elements in the ocean, opal, calcium carbonate, organic matter in sediments, and CO2 and N2O in the atmosphere. The work will be carried out in collabo-ration with members from the division and benefit from in-house expertise in ice core sciences and land biosphere modeling.
We require a Ph.D. in Physics, Environmental Sciences, or similar disciplines. Experience in numerical modeling, excellent writing skills, and the ability to fruitfully collaborate with others are essential.A topical research area is to understand changes in atmospheric CO2 and climate over the past millions of years. Investigating the past helps to improve our understanding of carbon cycle-climate feedbacks relevant under human-caused global warming. We offer the opportunity to in-vestigate variability in CO2 and ocean biogeochemistry using the Bern3D ocean-atmosphere model.