Dr Tom Williams-Antarctic Palaeoceanographer, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Tasmania and ACEAS
Meet Tom
Tom works to understand the response of the Southern Ocean and Antarctic continent to climatic changes during the early- to mid- Pliocene period. He is also interested in the cycling of neodymium – a rare earth element – within the sediments and ocean around East Antarctica. The ratio of neodymium isotopes within marine sediments used as a tracer for analysis of past changes in ocean circulation.
Biography
As a paleoceanographer and paleoclimatologist, my main research interests lie in observation-based reconstructions of past ocean chemistry and circulation pathways. I am particularly interested in how past ocean-ice-atmosphere interactions within the Southern Ocean have modified ocean chemistry and circulation, and how these changes may have helped determine Earth’s climate. It is my hope that by better understanding how the Southern Ocean has both responded to, and driven changes in, climate through the Earth’s recent geological past, we can better understand how the Earth system will respond to current human-caused climate change. I am also interested in geochemical cycling within the modern Southern Ocean, with a view to better understand past geochemical variability reconstructed in marine sediments.
I worked as an Assistant Marine Geologist at the British Antarctic Survey in the UK during 2013 and 2014, where I also completed a PhD in 2018 jointly with Cambridge University Department of Earth Sciences. Following this, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Florida’s Department of Geological Sciences. In January 2022, I started work as an Antarctic Paleoceanographer at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, as part of the ACEAS programme.
Email:
Scientific Committee Membership
ACEAS Paleoclimate working group
Million-Year Ice Core (MYIC) Science Linkages
ACEAS Sub-ice continent working group
Publications:
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