2021-2030 is the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development aiming at "The science we need for the ocean we want" through "Transformative ocean science solutions for sustainable development, connecting people and our ocean". In FOCUS we aim to make a significant UK contribution to the Decade through a broad body of scientific endeavour. This crosses multiple disciplines, focusing on the coastal zone and shelf seas at a global scale (the "Global Coastal Ocean") and addresses each of the seven expected Decade Outcomes: i A clean ocean ; ii A healthy and resilient ocean; iii A productive ocean; iv A predicted ocean; v A safe ocean; vi An accessible ocean; vii An inspiring and engaging ocean. The Decade works through endorsed international programmes, and NOC and PML have been involved in the co-design of several of these, notably: CoastPredict: Observing and Predicting the Global Coastal Ocean and Ocean Acidification Research for Sustainability. Alongside the UN Decade, the World Climate Research Programme is currently designing "Light House Activities" and FOCUS scientists will contribute to this, particularly on Sea Level Rise in Safe Climate Landing. Alongside these global partnerships we will work with regional partnerships, such as the SE Asia Land to Ocean Network and the Network-to-Network for the Gulf of Mexico, and many research institutions and universities around the world. Working in these partnerships, we address the fact that the global coastal ocean is under immense pressure from human instigated climate change and population growth. Climatic changes in marine temperature, circulation and acidity impact on marine ecosystems and their ability to provide 'ecosystem services' such food from fisheries and drawing down CO2 from the atmosphere. Sea level rise and increases in storminess hugely increase the risk of coastal flooding. How these climate impacts act together and relate to changes to episodic events (such as storms) is a major knowledge gap. Similarly, substantially rising human activity in the coastal zone (e.g. in growing megacities) leads to increased risk of pollution and degradation to marine environments without careful management. Many aspects, such as nutrient pollution from agriculture and sewage, have been investigated for years, but others are newly emerging, e.g. the impacts of mining waste, pollution from shipping and artificial light at night. Again, how these multiple direct human impacts act together is largely unknown. Coastal habitats, such as seagrasses, mangroves and seaweeds have the potential to draw down substantial amounts of CO2 and help stall climate change, but only if they are healthy ecosystems. Hence, understanding how the protection and restoration of these environments can improve CO2 drawdown is an important aspect in fighting climate change. Finally, to address the issues described above on a global scale requires new approaches to translating understanding from one region to another - particularly from data rich to data sparse areas. This involves developing approaches to classify the global coastal ocean, based on our understanding of oceanographic processes, and to develop ways to capture and compare the exposure of climate change risk of different sea areas. Social information can be added to this to create a whole-system view, for example, from climate to ecosystems to fisheries and to people. In FOCUS we will bring to bear the full range of oceanographic tools to address these pressing issues, including numerical models, satellite remote sensing, field surveys and laboratory work. Extensively we will reanalyse existing data from around the world in novel and innovative ways and we will engage with scientists from many regions (such as South and South East Asia and the Caribbean), to build on existing knowledge, in a spirit of mutual respect and transparency, freely sharing methods and data.

The single most important boundary condition for modelling ice sheet evolution is bed topography, from which - in conjunction with surface elevations - ice thickness can be determined. This importance is demonstrated by the facts that ice motion due to deformation is very sensitive to ice thickness-the thicker the ice the more it deforms-and that the point at which the ice sheet is contact with the ocean is also very sensitive to thickness and bed profile. Small changes in ice thickness and basal stickiness (friction) at this contact point can result in large change in ice discharge. Advances in our knowledge of ice thickness and bedrock topography in Greenland have been made since the last comprehensive study was published over ten years ago. The most recent bed data set, published in 2013, possesses more complete coverage of the ice sheet interior and margins and was sufficient to resolve a huge ancient canyon, carved by a river tens of thousands of years ago, and now buried beneath the several kilometres of ice. The canyon extends for more than 750 km, and is possibly the longest in the world yet has only just been discovered. Close to the ice sheet margins, however, gaps in observations are still prevalent due to the steep relief and warm ice in these areas. This is particularly true for the numerous outlet glaciers that control ice discharge into the ocean. Outlet glaciers are where ice is flowing fastest, where the greatest ice mass losses have been observed and where models are most sensitive to small changes, or errors, in bed geometry. Furthermore, the topography of the seafloor (the bathymetry) in the fjords that the glaciers flow into is, currently, poorly known. Uncertainties of hundreds of metres in bathymetry exist while numerical modelling studies have shown that the bathymetry has a strong influence on the interaction of the ocean with the glaciers. These big errors in the bathymetry mean that the models will have difficulty simulating the behaviour of this interaction because the errors will feed into the results. It is the problem of "garbage in, garbage out". The models are limited by the quality of the data that are used to drive them. This project aims to address all these limitations by producing the "next generation" bed elevation data set for Greenland and the coastal area including bathymetry. It will also provide key information on the properties of the ice/bed interface: in particular whether there is water at the bed or not. The result of this work will be data sets that will greatly advance our understanding of the sensitivity of the ice sheet to changes in atmospheric and oceanic forcing.

Catastrophic failure is a critically-important phenomenon in the brittle Earth on a variety of scales, from human-induced seismicity to natural landslides, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. It is invariably associated with the structural concentration of damage in the form of smaller faults and fractures on localised zones of deformation, eventually resulting in system-sized brittle failure along a distinct and emergent fault plane. However, the process of localisation is not well understood - smaller cracks spontaneously self-organise along the incipient fault plane, often immediately before failure, but the precise mechanisms involved have yet to be determined. Many questions remain, including : Q1 - How do cracks, pores and grain boundaries interact locally with the applied stress field to cause catastrophic failure to occur at a specific place, orientation and time?; Q2 what dictates the relative importance of quasi-static and dynamic processes?; and Q3 - why can we detect precursors to catastrophic failure only in some cases? Here we will address these questions directly by imaging the whole localisation process, using a newly-developed x-ray transparent deformation cell and fast synchrotron x-ray micro-tomography. We will visualise the nature and evolution of the localisation process structurally and seismically together for the first time at high resolution in a synchrotron. We will deliberately slow the process to image its evolution, and to investigate the strain-rate dependence of the underlying mechanisms, using rapid electronic monitoring and feedback control. This will provide unprecedented direct observation of the relevant mechanisms, including the contribution of seismic (local cracking producing acoustic emissions) and aseismic (elastic loading and silent irreversible damage) processes to the outcome. This innovative combination of techniques is timely, feasible, and is likely to transform our understanding of the role of microscopic processes in controlling system-size failure. The results will provide interpretive models for similar processes in natural and human-induced seismicity, including scale-model tests of strategies for managing the risk of large induced events.

All cells are covered in a forest of diverse carbohydrates structures known as the glycocalyx. There are many types of cell-surface carbohydrates (glycans) - some are long linear polymer chains, while others have short highly branched architectures like small trees. The composition of the glycocalyx is different for different types of cells - while the range of glycan structures present can be similar, the relative quantities of each glycan can vary considerably from one type of cell to another. Glycocalyx composition also changes if a cell becomes cancerous, and so measuring the composition of a glycocalyx presents opportunities for cancer diagnosis. Currently, the only way to measure how much of each type of glycan is present on a cell is to chop them off the cell, and weigh them individually in a mass spectrometer. The aim of this research project is to develop molecular tools that can be used to quantify how much of a particular glycan is present on an intact cell surface, and to bind with high selectivity to cells that have a particular glycan composition. These probes will have applications in understanding biological processes, and could ultimately be used as medical diagnostics and for targeted delivery of drugs to specific cell types. So how do you differentiate between two cells that have the same set of cell surface molecules, and differ only in the relative abundance of those molecules? Traditional probes like antibodies usually bind with high affinity to only one or two copies of their target molecule. They can be used to tell if a specific type of molecule is present on a cell surface, but not to bind selectively in response to a specific density of their target molecules. Density-dependent 'superselective' binding requires a different strategy that is inspired by glycobiology - the biology of carbohydrates. Carbohydrate-binding proteins often interact relatively weakly with their target glycan and strong interactions are achieved by having many copies of the glycans and glycan-binding proteins interacting with one another in concert - so-called multivalent binding. In this way, many weak interactions come together to enhance binding strength, but it also greatly enhances the selectivity of binding. Here we will develop multivalent probes that can bind in a density-dependent manner to cell surface glycans. We will develop probes that can distinguish between cancerous and healthy cells, and probes that can be used to map out complex net-like glycocalyces that regulate the function of neuronal cells. The methods developed will have much broader application for highly specific binding to target cells in both biology and medicine.

The UK and global research and development communities have made tremendous strides in electronic device prototyping. Platforms that support conventional electronics have become well established, and the emerging potential of printed electronics and related additive technologies is clear. Together these support fast and versatile prototyping of the form and function of digital devices that underpin novel interactive data-driven experiences, including the Internet of Things (IoT), wearable technologies and more. However, challenges remain to realise their full potential. Interactive devices prototyped in labs and makerspaces implement novel capabilities and materials which require holistic manufacturing capability beyond simulation of conventional electronics. Even for conventional bench designs, to make the transition from prototype to product they need to be suitably robust, safe, long-lived, performant and cost-effective to deliver value as products - whether as a series of one-off mass customised devices, low-volume batches, or mass-produced artefacts. Unfortunately, the transition from prototype to production is not a natural one for end users; many ideas with potential don't progress beyond the first few designs. Democratising access to device production is the key next step in underpinning scalability and entrepreneurship in digital systems. We propose a Network+ of universities, research organisations and commercial enterprises who share the common goal of improving the transition from prototyping to production of digital devices. The Pro2 community will build upon the design and fabrication expertise of its researchers and practitioners to facilitate a deep synthesis of established principles, techniques and technologies and develop new concepts that span computer science, engineering and manufacturing. We will complement the on-going global investment into a variety of 'digital manufacturing' topics - including the UK's Made Smarter initiative - by tackling the challenge of progressively and cost-effectively transitioning from unconventional and single digital device prototypes, through tens of copies that can verify a design and validate utility, to batch production of hundreds to thousands of units. In prototyping, as additive manufacture and printed electronics converge further, in unconventional fields such as soft robotics and 4D printing, we need to identify how to integrate and optimise tools into workflows that support digital behaviour across materials, scales and functionalities. In production, smoothing the path from one-off microcontroller prototypes to scale-up is a significant challenge, and requires new processes and tools as well as reconfiguration of business models and services. Our vision for 'organic scaling' from prototype to production will allow faster exploration and exploitation of these digital device concepts and applications. This will accelerate the adoption of IoT, the growth of new consumer electronics markets, and more generally underpin the data-driven digital transformation of many industries. It will enable new research directions, create new business opportunities and drive economic growth.