This research proposal links to the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 396 which will drill several scientific research boreholes along the offshore Norwegian continental margin. The Norwegian margin is one of the best studied examples of a passive rifted margin associated with voluminous magmatic activity. However, key scientific questions associated with the origins of magmatism and its impacts on global climate at this time remain. The objectives of the cruise cover a wide range of high impact scientific research areas including assessing the role of the Iceland plume on excess magmatism, understanding along axis variations in magmatism, determining the nature and depositional environment of volcanism, and assessing the role that magmatism played in driving global warming (Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM) at this time. A secondary goal of the expedition is to appraise the potential of permanent carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the volcanic sequences. This research project will address several of the EXP 396 objectives focusing on three specific areas of research. Objective 1: Understanding the interplay between magmatism and eruption environments during rifting. Volcanic cores will be used to appraise how volcanism and the environment of eruption changed in space and time during continental rifting. Detailed facies analyses of the volcanic sequences will be undertaken to reveal whether the eruptions occurred within subaerial, marginal, or subaqueous environments. Geophysical logging data will be used alongside core observations to build a comprehensive and integrated volcanological model for the borehole penetrated sequences. The geophysical volcanic model will then be used to calibrate extensive 3D seismic surveys in the area which in turn will enable mapping of volcanic facies over large parts of the margin. This aspect of the project will enable new understanding about how extrusive magmatism is linked to margin scale base-level changes which in turn will give new data for testing competing models for volcanic rifted margin evolution such as plume-pulsing versus plate tectonics. Objective 2: Appraising the carbon capture and storage (CCS) potential of break-up related volcanic sequences. Pilot studies on Iceland (Carbfix) and in Washington State, USA (Wallula), have demonstrated that CO2 reacts with basaltic rocks to form carbonate minerals, effectively permanently storing the CO2. Permanent storage clearly reduces the risk of leakage and has been demonstrated to occur over incredibly rapid timescales on the order of a few years. The huge volume of offshore break-up related volcanic sequences that will be tested during EXP. 396 could offer an alternative storage site for permanent storage of anthropogenic CO2. Volcanic sequences can have good reservoir properties, however, extensive weathering and alteration can also significantly diminish and clog up the pore structure. Within this study petrophysical analyses of volcanic cores will be performed to give important new constraints on the reservoir potential and sealing capacity of the Atlantic margin volcanic sequences. Objective 3: Understanding the temporal and spatial evolution of magma petrogenesis within the province and its potential role in driving the PETM. Geochemical analyses from the various volcanic sequences will be used to appraise whether elevated and/or fluctuating mantle temperatures led to excess magmatism in mid-Norway. Regional datasets will be compared to appraise how melting changed along the margin and whether these results resolve competing plume or plate tectonic models. Some sites will target hydrothermal vents associated with break-up related intrusions which caused massive emissions of Greenhouse gases. High resolution core-log-seismic appraisal coupled with isotopic dating of the ejecta layers will hopefully improve the age constraints on these processes in order to better appraise links to the PETM.

Plankton are organisms that in essence drift in the oceans. They range from microbial organisms to jelly fish and krill. Plankton have played a key role in planetary ecosphere functioning (having produced half of the atmospheric oxygen that we breath, and also most of the limestone and much of the non-coal fossil fuels). They continue to play an important role in climate change events, food sustainability (fisheries), down to local societal levels in harmful algal blooms and sea-snot (beach foam) events. This project will provide the foundation for pivotal developments in marine science, namely configuring plankton for the digital twins of the oceans. Digital twins (DTs) are computer-based analogues for real systems; well-known examples are flight simulators and many reality-based video game platforms. DTs are heavily used in engineering and in business, providing design and testing platforms. They are especially useful for 'what-if?' testing. However, it is critical that the end user has trust that the platform they are using does indeed describe a digital twin that would be deemed satisfactory to experts in the real system. This work comprises essential underpinning for the UK and international initiatives to produce within this decade digital twins of oceanic processes of societal importance, including the United Nations Digital Twins of the Oceans (DITTO) initiative. The idea behind DITTO, for example, is to see the generation of DT platforms, freely available to the public with a suitable graphic-user-interface, to support education, management and decision making. Some of these may be within game-like platforms to engage and inform the public about plankton (why their local beach is out-of-bounds due to harmful algal bloom or jelly-fish, for example), while other platforms will support science policy and management. Despite the critical importance of plankton in marine ecology, the current generation of computer descriptions ('models') provides only a poor caricature of the real organisms that is quite unsuitable for digital twin applications. The reasons for this include a lack of suitable data to directly support modelling, and a hitherto poor interaction between modelers and those empiricists who study real plankton. The project will work by exploiting 'expert witness validation', an approach similar to that of the famous Turing test for artificial intelligence, which aims to produce models that are sufficiently realistic in their behaviour that experts in the subject (plankton) cannot tell the difference. The project will work with experts in each plankton group to reach a consensus on what computer models of different plankton types should behave like such that they could be considered as a 'digital twin'. The one-year project will see the production of reference-type materials (such as check-lists, and example response patterns) to guide future development of plankton models, specifically for digital twin applications to ensure that the description of these organisms accords with the expectations of experts in the field.

The balance between the production of organic carbon during phytoplankton photosynthesis and its consumption by bacterial, zooplankton and phytoplankton respiration determines how much carbon can be stored in the ocean and how much remains in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The amount of organic carbon stored in the ocean is as large as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and so is a key component in two global carbon cycle calculations needed to avoid a global temperature rise of more than 1.5 degrees C: the calculation of the technological and societal efforts required to achieve net zero carbon emissions and the calculation of the efficiency of ocean-based engineering approaches to directly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Yet, despite its vital role, our ability to predict how ocean carbon storage will change in the future is severely limited by our lack of understanding of how plankton respiration varies in time and space, how it is apportioned between bacteria and zooplankton and how sensitive it is to climate change-induced shifts in environmental conditions such as increasing temperature and decreasing oxygen. This woeful situation is due to the significant challenge of measuring respiration in the deep-sea and the uncoordinated way in which these respiration data are archived. This project will directly address these two problems. We will take advantage of our leadership and participation in an international programme which deploys thousands of oceanic floats measuring temperature, oxygen and organic carbon in the global ocean, in an international team of experts focused on quantifying deep-sea microbial respiration, and our experience of collating international datasets, to produce an unprecedented dataset of bacterial and zooplankton respiration. We will derive estimates of respiration based on data from floats, so that together with estimates derived from recently developed methods including underwater gliders, the new database will include respiration measurements calculated over a range of time and space scales. Crucially, respiration rates will be coupled with concurrent environmental data such as temperature, oxygen and organic carbon. This dataset will enable us to quantify the seasonal and spatial variability of respiration and derive equations describing how respiration changes with the proportion of bacteria and zooplankton present and with the chemical and physical properties of the water. These equations can then be used in climate models to better predict how respiration and therefore ocean carbon storage will change in the future with climate-change induced shifts in temperature, oxygen, organic carbon and plankton community. We will take part in a hybrid hands-on and online international training course on observations and models of deep-water respiration targeted to early career researchers from developing and developed countries to showcase the useability of the respiration database and the global array of oceanic floats. We will also prepare Science Festival exhibits on observing life in the deep ocean for schoolchildren. The deliverables of the project - a unique global open-access database of respiration measurements, new equations describing the sensitivity of respiration to changing temperature and oxygen suitable for climate models and online training materials for early career researchers - are of benefit to scientists who aim to predict how a changing climate will affect the storage of carbon in the ocean, educators who train the next generation of ocean scientists and practitioners, policy makers who need to quantify nationally determined contributions to actions limiting global warming, and scientists, engineers, lawyers, governing bodies and commercial companies designing, evaluating and implementing ocean-based carbon dioxide removal technologies.

Over periods of hundreds of millions of years, Earth's surface is recycled via the fragmentation of continents to form new oceans and elsewhere the sinking of oceanic plates into the mantle beneath. The breakup of continents involves progressive stretching and thinning prior to final breakup and the formation of new oceanic crust from molten rock that rises from below, flanked by continental margins comprised of thinned continental crust. There is a range of continental margin types, varying from those where the underlying mantle starts to melt very early in the process and very large volumes are added to the crust, to those "magma-poor" margins where there is little evidence for such melting until the very end of the process. At these magma-poor margins, which are common globally, it has been found that the crust can thin to nothing and mantle rocks can be exposed at the seabed, where they react with seawater in a process called serpentinisation. This serpentinisation plays an important role in exchange of chemicals between the Earth's interior and the ocean, and may be particularly intense around geological faults. While the final stages of thinning of the continental crust have been studied extensively over the past three decades, the transition from exposing mantle at the seabed through to forming new oceanic crust by the eruption of molten rock has been less well studied. Even designing such a study can be challenging because it is often unclear how wide this transition is. Also, because such mantle exposure has also been found in the middle of the oceans, this transition may be more complicated than often assumed. Our project will use a novel combination of geophysical techniques to study this final stage of continental breakup at a magma-poor continental margin southwest of the UK. There, crust that seems from all available data to be "normal" oceanic crust lies within about 150 km of crust confirmed by drilling to be continental. A region of serpentinised mantle, now overlain by up to around 1 km of mud, lies in between. For the first time in such a location, we will use electromagnetic waves, generated from a towed source, to measure the electrical resistivity of the crust and serpentinised mantle. Electromagnetic waves are strongly attenuated by seawater, so the source must be powerful and must be towed close to the seabed. We will use a combination of towed sensors, that are most sensitive to structures just below the seabed, and seabed detectors that can measure tiny fluctuations in electrical and magnetic fields at distances of up to tens of kilometres from our source, and thus allow us to probe deeper. We will also use some of the same seabed receivers to detect sound waves travelling through the crust from a source towed close to the ship, and to detect lower-frequency electromagnetic waves that are generated by natural sources and penetrate deeper into the Earth. The data that we collect will allow us, via the use of powerful computer programmes, to construct models of the variation of both sound speed and electrical resistivity in the crust and in the upper few tens of kilometres of the mantle beneath. These parameters provide a powerful combination because they are sensitive in different ways to the nature of the rocks. The electrical resistivity is particularly sensitive to the presence of water, and also of a mineral called magnetite that can be formed during the process of serpentinisation. The sound velocity is less sensitive to the presence of water but can be more sensitive to variations in the minerals present. From our models, we expect to be able to distinguish the continental crust and mantle, the oceanic crust and mantle, and the nature of the materials in between. We will then link these observations to computer models of the physical and chemical processes occurring as continents break apart. Thus we will find out how the formation of new oceanic crust actually starts.

With the Kigali Amendment coming into force in 2019, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer has entered a major new phase in which the production and use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) will be controlled in most major economies. This landmark achievement will enhance the Protocol's already-substantial benefits to climate, in addition to its success in protecting the ozone layer. However, recent scientific advances have shown that challenges lie ahead for the Montreal Protocol, due to the newly discovered production of ozone-depleting substances (ODS) thought to be phased-out, rapid growth of ozone-depleting compounds not controlled under the Protocol, and the potential for damaging impacts of halocarbon degradation products. This proposal tackles the most urgent scientific questions surrounding these challenges by combining state-of-the-art techniques in atmospheric measurements, laboratory experiments and advanced numerical modelling. We will: 1) significantly expand atmospheric measurement coverage to better understand the global distribution of halocarbon emissions and to identify previously unknown atmospheric trends, 2) combine industry models and atmospheric data to improve our understanding of the relationship between production (the quantity controlled under the Protocol), "banks" of halocarbons stored in buildings and products, and emissions to the atmosphere, 3) determine recent and likely future trends of unregulated, short-lived halocarbons, and implications for the timescale of recovery of the ozone layer, 4) explore the complex atmospheric chemistry of the newest generation of halocarbons and determine whether breakdown products have the potential to contribute to climate change or lead to unforeseen negative environmental consequences, 5) better quantify the influence of halocarbons on climate and refine the climate- and ozone-depletion-related metrics used to compare the effects of halocarbons in international agreements and in the design of possible mitigation strategies. This work will be carried out by a consortium of leaders in the field of halocarbon research, who have an extensive track record of contributing to Montreal Protocol bodies and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ensuring lasting impact of the new developments that will be made.