Postdoctoral Research Associate in Physical Geography

The Role

Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the field of Quantitative Sedimentology and Geophysics of Seafloor Processes. The successful applicant will be part of two major NERC funded projects to make the first detailed measurements of turbidity currents in action in the deep-sea, and to develop novel technologies for monitoring these seabed sediment flows. Turbidity currents form the deepest canyons, longest channels and largest sediment accumulations on our planet. They also break seafloor telecommunication cable networks that form the backbone of global data transfer, and there is emerging understand that they bury globally significant amounts of organic carbon in the deep-sea. This is an exciting and inspiring opportunity to analyse the first measurements of turbidity currents in the deep-sea. This data can lead to step changes in understanding how these seabed sediment flows operate, and their wider implications for hazards to telecommunication cables, organic carbon transfer and sequestration, impacts on seabed life, or role in transferring microplastics and other pollutants.

The successful application will part of two major international projects have already involved four marine research cruises to the Congo Submarine Canyon and Fan in 2019, 2020, 2024 and 2025. Those month-long marine cruises have already generated a superb field data-set that includes monitoring of the longest sediment flows yet measured in action on Earth, and the only time-lapse bathymetric surveys of a major submarine canyon-channel. The most recent cruise in 2025 showed that the end of the Congo Submarine Channel is highly active (15% of the time), despite being 1,000 km from shore, and this seafloor channel grew by 10 km in a single year.

These two NERC projects will also underpin another two marine research cruises in March-April 2026 and 2027. These future cruises will deploy moored sensors (e.g. acoustic Doppler current profilers - ADCPs) in a series of submarine canyons in the Gulf of Mexico and along the US East Coast. Time-lapse bathymetric surveys and sediment cores will also be collected again during these cruises in 2026 and 2027, which also aim to test novel geophone-based seabed sensors.

The Postdoctoral Research Associate will benefit from being part of an unusually large international project team including scientists from the UK Universities of Durham, Newcastle, Hull, Loughborough, and the UK National Oceanography Centre, together with collaborators at IFREMER in France, GEOMAR in Germany and MBARI in the USA.

The successful application will assist in analysing field data including from moored-sensors (e.g. acoustic Doppler current profilers), time-lapse bathymetric and sub-bottom profiler surveys of the seabed, and sediment cores. They may also assist in analysis of monitoring data from Ocean Bottom Seismometers and Hydrophones. These data sets include those already collected from the Congo Submarine Canyon in previous marine cruises, and data collected by future cruises to the Gulf of Mexico and US East Coast. The aims of these analyses include to understand: the frequency and triggers of turbidity currents, what these flows comprise and how they behave, and how they sculpt the seafloor or are recorded by their deposits. The successful applicant will ideally also seek to understand the wider implications of these flows, such as for hazards to seabed cables, and processes of organic carbon burial or pollutant transfer to the deep sea. They will ideally take part in two forthcoming marine campaigns to the Gulf of Mexico and US East Coast in 2026 and 2027 and thereby help to collect data onboard research vessels. They will also be involved in planning logistics for these two marine research cruises, and in analysing, publishing and archiving a range of field data after the marine research cruises have finished.