Research
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Colin Goldblatt
Biogeochemical Modelling
Atmospheric composition is a product of the evolving biology and geochemistry of the Earth. Understanding how this has evolved over time is fundamental to our understanding of planetary habitability.
The largest chemical transition in Earth history was the transition from a reducing to an oxidising atmosphere, the Great Oxidation, pproximately 2.4 billion years ago. I have proposed that this can be understood as a bistability in atmospheric oxygen. This naturally explains the existance of low oxygen after the origin of photosynthesis and the Great Oxidation can be understood as the switch between the low and high stable states. See my Nature paper and the accompanying News and Views piece by Jim Kasting.
Climate Modelling
In the context of the Early Earth, the dominant problem in understanding climate is the Faint Young Sun paradox. The amount of energy received from the Sun was 20% less in the Archean than today, yet the Earth avoided prolonged extreme glaciation. The probably solution to this was a much stronger greenhouse effect in the past, but no set of gasses has been identified which can resolve the paradox withing constraints on atmospheric composition. I’ve got a publication submitted on this…
Radiative Transfer
Predicting the climatic response to increasing concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is a major component of contemporary meteorological research. The most fundamental part of this problem is the representation of the radiative transfer in General Circulation Models (GCMs) and other climate models. Accuracy of the codes used for radiative transfer is therefore critical to the entire modelling effort.
Arising from my palaeoclimate research, I conducted an evaluation of the longwave radiative transfer codes used in the Met Office Unified Model, identifying that gaseous adsorption was poorly represented in certain situations. Hopefully, rigorous analysis of the performance of such codes will help improve the modelling of climate change.
Geoengeneering
With the persistent failure of humanity to limit its production of dangerous levels of greenhouse gasses, various proposals are being mooted to take deliberate action to engineer the global climate and geochemistry. Some such proposals might be useful, but others are dangerous. I was involved in work to point out the dangers of one such proposal.
Physical Oceanography
My undergraduate degree was in physical oceanography. For my dissertation, I studied the implementation of a soft constrain for boundaries into objectively mapped velocity fields.
Later, I took part in a five week research cruise on the RRS James Clark Ross in the Southern Ocean. This cruise included the first deployment of an autonomus underwater vehicle under an Antarctic ice shelf.