The Southern Ocean has a unique and iconic ecosystem. It includes vast reserves of krill which could potentially replace dwindling fish catches elsewhere. It helps stabilise the global climate by absorbing greenhouse gases and it supplies some of the key nutrients which sustain life in other oceans. These functions emphasize the crucial role of the Southern Ocean ecosystem in the workings of the Earth as a whole. There is strong evidence that risk posed by climate change is more severe and imminent for the Southern Ocean ecosystem than almost any other marine ecosystem. This threatens the ecosystem's ability to deliver the benefits described above. Assessment of the Southern Ocean ecosystem's likely responses to change is required to support the management and protection of the benefits it provides. This requires an international effort to bring together scientists with expertise on ecosystems, climate and biogeochemistry (i.e. how nutrients and other chemicals move through the oceans, atmosphere and living things). Knowledge about individual regions must be integrated to explain processes operating at the "circumpolar" scale of the entire ocean. BAS scientists have played a major role in developing the Integrating Climate and Ecosystem Dynamics in the Southern Ocean (ICED) programme which has begun to coordinate and focus this expertise. We are requesting funding to capitalise on the current progress and lead the implementation phase of ICED, under two main objectives: (1) To lead, coordinate and support key ICED community activities identified in the ICED Science Plan and Implementation Strategy (2) To develop the scientific basis for projecting the likely response of Southern Ocean ecosystems to plausible scenarios of environmental change and so generate high impact outputs to feed into global assessments. Addressing the first objective will involve: coordination and communication between different science strands and national programmes; coordination of scientific activities; expanding the network of researchers; pursuing funding opportunities; programme support and liaison with the International Programme Office of IMBER (Integrating Marine Biogeochemical and Ecosystems Research), the global programme which ICED is a part of; and developing closer coordination with other key international bodies. Activities addressing the second objective will be based around two scientific workshops. The first will mainly be coordinated and funded through international partners on behalf of ICED. It will assess the state of knowledge on environmental change and biological responses, and produce initial projections of the biological response to climate change. The second workshop, for which we are requesting part funding, will evaluate the results of ongoing efforts to predict how the structure of food webs responds to change and produce projections of how food webs might change in future. These workshops should lead to high impact academic outputs. Together with associated activities within ICED they will help to ensure that the Southern Ocean ecosystem's response to change is given due consideration by the IPCC, in the policy outputs of the International Polar Year and in developing sustainable fisheries management. We are at a critical point in the development of ICED, where we need to maintain momentum. The requested funding will allow NERC to take a lead role in implementing the ICED programme and coordinating international contributions. The activities outlined here will strengthen and facilitate the international collaboration necessary to fully address the significant challenge of integrating Southern Ocean ecosystem, climate and biogeochemical research. This will ensure progress towards an integrated, understanding of the structure and function of the Southern Ocean, its response to change and its importance to the Earth as a whole and to mankind.

The importance of the greenhouse gases CO2 and CH4 for climate is well established. There is broad scientific consensus that human activities are the main driver for increasing concentrations of these greenhouse gases (GHGs), particularly over the past century. Based on accurate surface measurements we know that approximately 45% of the CO2 emitted by human activities remain in the atmosphere. The net balance is apparently being taken up by global oceans, terrestrial vegetation and soils. However, there are substantial uncertainties associated with the nature, location and strength of these natural components of the carbon cycle. The Amazon region is one of the largest forested regions in the world, representing the largest reservoir of above ground organic carbon. Amazonia is not only subject to changes in climate but also to rapid environmental change due to fast population growth and economic development causing extensive deforestation and urbanisation. Such external drivers can lead to further shifts in the carbon balance resulting in release of carbon stored in the biomass and soil to the atmosphere, with implications for accelerating the growth of atmospheric GHG concentrations and climate change. Despite its important role for the global carbon cycle, current understanding of the Amazonian, and more broadly the tropical, carbon cycle is poorly constrained by observations. These knowledge gaps result in large uncertainties in the fate of the Amazonian carbon budget under a warming climate, and consequently hamper any predictive skill of carbon-climate models. Since 2009, the Amazon region has been the focus of major UK and Brazilian research projects that aim at improving our knowledge of the Amazonian carbon cycle using detailed, but localized aircraft observations of CO2 and CH4 at a number of sites. These measurements are a great advance but they remain highly localized in space and time. Space-borne measurements have the ability to fill these observational gaps by providing observations with dense spatial and temporal coverage in regions poorly sampled by surface networks. It is essential, however, that such space-based observations are properly tied to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reference standard to ensure acceptance of space-based datasets by the carbon cycle community and to prevent misleading results on regional carbon budgets. The central aim of this proposal is to link the in-situ measurements with remotely sensed satellite data to establish an integrated Amazonian Carbon Observatory where satellite data complements the in situ data by filling the gaps between the in situ sites and by extending the coverage over the whole Amazon region. Satellite observations of GHGs are now available from a dedicated instrument on board the Japanese GOSAT satellite and results look very promising. However, satellite retrievals over the Amazon (and the Tropics) are intrinsically difficult and the accuracy of such GHG retrievals has not been established for this region which is a major obstacle for the exploitation of space-based data to constrain carbon fluxes over the Amazon. We propose to establish a network of Brazilian and UK researchers to bridge the gap between in-situ and remote sensing observations and communities and to evaluate the feasibility of remote sensing of GHG concentrations for the purpose of GHG flux monitoring over Amazonia to improve our understanding of the Amazonian carbon cycle and to increase our ability for observing tropical carbon fluxes. The proposed network will bring together world-class expertise to address highly relevant and timely scientific questions that will advance our understanding of the carbon cycle of the Amazon. It will strongly strengthen and expand UK and Brazilian relationships and it will help further strengthen the leading role of UK researchers in many areas relevant to this proposal.

Neutrinos are ethereal particles which are extremely difficult to detect. They have a high abundance in the universe (around a trillion neutrinos pass through the average person every second), but having masses less than a millionth that of an electron and only interacting via the weak force and gravity, their probability of interaction is very small. In fact, neutrinos can pass through the entire diameter of the earth without interaction! So how one can observe and study these ethereal particles at all in terrestrial experiments? The solution is to construct a detector that is made up of as large a volume of material as possible and to produce neutrino beams with incredibly intense flux. Such facilities are operational and exciting new facilities are planned. For example, in the Deep underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) under construction, neutrinos produced at Fermilab will pass 800 miles through the earths mantle to another laboratory in Sanford, where detectors comprise 40 tonnes of liquid Argon! The rare interactions of neutrinos in detectors are obtained by examining the reaction products produced (usually with detection of a knocked-out proton) when a neutrino interacts with an atomic nucleus. The energy of the neutrino that produced the reaction is then inferred by nuclear reaction theoretical models. The problems stem from the fact that the atomic nuclei used for this purpose need to be large in order to get enough neutrino induced events; for example the Argon at Dune has 40 protons and neutrons in it's nucleus. A large nucleus is a very complicated object and the modelling of the reaction processes is very difficult with lots of outstanding questions: Can we suppress events where the knocked out nucleon scattered on it's way out of the nucleus? How well can we suppress contributions where the neutrino is absorbed on more than one nucleon and we only detect one? Producing a pion from a nucleon has a similar probability to knockout, but how well can we suppress these erroneous events in the experimental data? Can we get rid of processes where a pion (or pions) are initially produced in the nucleus and then reabsorbed to knock out nucleons? What about if we excite a nucleon in the reaction mechanism, and how do such excited nucleons behave in the nucleus? These are merely a small set of outstanding questions that directly impact the determination of the incident neutrino energy and flux. In our programme we will use an analogous reaction to the neutrino-nucleus interactions: we will scatter electrons off the nuclei rather than neutrinos. This has the advantage that we get many orders of magnitude more events to test the models and very importantly, in a controlled way! By knowing the incident electron energy, all the assumptions in getting from nuclear fragments to the beam energy for a whole host of reactions and a wide range of nuclei becomes accessible. This data set is urgently needed to reduce errors in the theoretical modelling; these errors typically produce the largest systematic error for the neutrino experiments. By using common theoretical models for the neutrino- and electron-induced reactions we can challenge the models and improve the modelling of various processes at a level of details that was previously impossible. This then reduces significantly any systematic errors in extracting physics from the next generation neutrino facilities. Progress requires a major programme of analysis of existing, as well as planned electron scattering experiments from nuclei with complex detector systems at Jefferson Laboratory (USA). We will construct a new analysis framework, which will be used to analyse and archive data in a form that makes it readily accessible and flexible for use by nuclear and particle communities for decades to come. The work will be carried out as part of a new collaborative network including colleagues at MIT, ODU, Jefferson Lab and Tel Aviv University.

The vast, remote seas which surround the continent of Antarctica are collectively known as the Southern Ocean. This region with its severe environment of mountainous seas, winter darkness, strong winds, freezing temperatures and ice is unsurprisingly one of the least explored and under-observed parts of the global ocean. However, because of these extremes, it plays a large and still unquantified role in Earth's climate system. In this region, large amounts of heat and carbon dioxide are exchanged between the atmosphere and the ocean. The physical mechanisms controlling these atmosphere-ocean exchanges are the subject of the NERC ORCHESTRA programme. We propose within PICCOLO to concentrate on the role that chemistry and biology play within those exchanges. In particular, PICCOLO will focus on understanding the mechanisms that transform the carbon contained in the seawater as it rises to the surface near Antarctica, interacts with the atmosphere, ice, phytoplankton and zooplankton inhabiting the near surface, before descending to the ocean depths. PICCOLO will undertake an ocean research expedition to the region close to Antarctica, as computer models and satellite images show that these are areas crucial for carbon processes. Freezing seawater in these regions releases salt into the water below, making it denser and therefore causing it to sink. Strong winds cause the sea ice to be pushed away from the Antarctic coastline, leaving areas of open water called polynyas. Within the polynyas the water has enough light during the summer to allow phytoplankton to grow, as well as providing dense waters which sink to the deep, driving a giant ocean conveyor belt which has a large impact upon Earth's climate system. The PICCOLO team will measure the key variables that control the biological and chemical processes in this region including iron, nutrients, phytoplankton and zooplankton. Crucially the team will study the controlling rate terms between different parts of this biological and chemical system. The PICCOLO team will make use of the latest technologies, including autonomous submarines, gliders and floats, to observe these processes in otherwise inaccessible and previously unstudied areas such as under the sea ice. Most ambitiously we will anchor a submarine to the seabed within a polynya and leave it over a winter season to collect data, recovering it the following spring. The PICCOLO team will put instruments on seals which will continuously take data as they dive up and down through the water, sending it back to scientists in real-time via satellite communication links. This wealth of novel data will be analysed by the PICCOLO team, using state of the art computer models, to test our ideas about how the whole complex set of physical, chemical and biological processes affects carbon. Conceptually we will follow an imaginary parcel of water through the system looking at processes between the atmosphere and ocean, biological processes in the surface layer, exchanges between the upper and lower ocean and the final fate of the carbon. The PICCOLO hypotheses address the following: (i) Factors controlling the exchange of carbon dioxide between the ocean and atmosphere and the role of ultra-violet light in controlling the concentration of carbon dioxide in seawater; (ii) The role of light, iron and nutrients in how carbon is processed by the plankton in the water; (iii) The mediating processes governing the export of carbon from the upper ocean to depth; (iv) The processes that take the carbon into the deep ocean on the next stage of its global journey.

Carbon is one of the essential elements required for life to exist, alongside energy and liquid water. In contrast to other parts of the Earth's biosphere, cycling of carbon compounds beneath glaciers and ice sheets is poorly understood, since these environments were believed to be devoid of life until recently. Significant populations of micro-organisms have recently been found beneath ice masses (Sharp et al., 1999; Skidmore et al., 2000; Foght et al., 2004). Evidence shows that, as in other watery environments on Earth, these sub-ice microbes are able to process a variety of carbon forms over a range of conditions, producing greenhouse gases, such as CO2 and CH4 (Skidmore et al., 2000). Almost nothing is known about 1) the range of carbon compounds available to microbes beneath ice, 2) the degree to which they can be used as food by microbes and 3) the rates of utilisation and the full spectrum of products (e.g. gases). This information is important for understanding the global carbon cycle on Earth. The fate of large amounts of organic carbon during the advance of the glaciers over the boreal forest during the last ice age (Van Campo et al., 1993), for example, is unknown and is likely to depend fundamentally on microbial processes in sub-ice environments. Current models of Earth's global carbon cycle assume this carbon is 'lost' from the Earth's system (Adarns et al., 1990; Van Campo et al., 1993; Francois et al., 1999). The possibility that it is used by subglacial microbes and converted to CO2 and CH4 has not been considered. This may have potential for explaining variations in Earth's atmospheric greenhouse gas composition over the last 2 million years. Sub-glacial environments lacking a modern carbon supply (e.g. trees, microbial cells) may represent ideal model systems for icy habitats on other terrestrial planets (e.g. Mars and Jupiter moons; Clifford, 1987; Pathare et al. 1998; Kivelson et al. 2000), and may be used to help determine whether life is possible in these more extreme systems.