On June 15 2006, the World Wildlife Federation (WWF) released a report called 'Killing them Softly', which highlighted concern over the accumulation and toxic effects of persistent organic pollutants present in Arctic wildlife, particularly marine mammals such as the Polar Bear. The Times newspaper ran a full-page article summarising this report and detailed 'legacy' chemicals such as DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), as well as the rise in 'new' chemical contaminants such as brominated flame retardents and perfluorinated surfactants, which are also accumulating in arctic fauna and adding an additional toxic risk. The high levels of these contaminants are making animals like the Polar Bear less capable of surviving the harsh Arctic conditions and dealing with the impacts of climate change. The work in this proposal intends to examine how these chemicals are delivered to surface waters of the Arctic Ocean, and hence the base of the marine foodweb. Persistent organic pollutants reach the Arctic via long-range transport, primarily through the air from source regions in Europe, North America and Asia, but also with surface ocean currents. The cold conditions of the Arctic help to promote the accumulation of these chemicals in snow and surface waters and slows any breakdown and evaporative loss. However, the processes that remove these pollutants from the atmosphere, store them in snow and ice and then transfer them to the Arctic Ocean are poorly understood, and yet these processes may differ depending on the chemcial in question. For example, some chemicals are rather volatile (i.e. they have a tendency to evaporate), so while they can reach the Arctic and be deposited with snowfall they are unlikely to reach the ocean due to ltheir oss back to the atmosphere during the arctic summer. On the other hand, heavier, less volatile chemicals, become strongly bound to snow and particles and can be delivered to seawater during summer melt. Climate change and a warmer world are altering the Arctic and affecting pollutant pathways. For example, the number of ice-leads (large cracks in the sea-ice that give rise to 'lakes' of seawater) are increasing. As a result, the pathways that chemical pollutants take to reach ocean waters are changing and may actually be made shorter, posing an even greater threat to marine wildlife. During ice-free periods, the ocean surface water is in contact with the atmosphere (rather than capped with sea-ice) and airborne pollutants can dissolve directly into cold surface waters. Encouragingly, there is evidence that some of the 'legacy' pollutants are declining in the arctic atmosphere, but many 'modern' chemicals are actually increasing in arctic biota and work is required to measure their input and understand their behaviour in this unusual environment. For example, in sunlit surface snow following polar sunrise (24 h daylight), some of these compounds can degrade by absorbing the sunlight, and in some cases, this can give rise to more stable compounds that subsequently enter the foodchain. Therefore, the quantity of chemical pollutant that is deposited with snowfall and the chemical's fate during snowmelt are important processes to address, especially to understand the loading and impact of these pollutants on the marine ecosystem. This project aims to understand these processes, and to understand which type of pollutants and their quantities pose the greatest threat to wildlife.

Copepod species of the genus Calanus (Calanus hereafter) are rice grain-sized crustaceans, distant relatives of crabs and lobsters, that occur throughout the Arctic Ocean consuming enormous quantities of microscopic algae (phytoplankton). These tiny animals represent the primary food source for many Arctic fish, seabirds and whales. During early spring they gorge on extensive seasonal blooms of diatoms, fat-rich phytoplankton that proliferate both beneath the sea ice and in the open ocean. This allows Calanus to rapidly obtain sufficient fat to survive during the many months of food scarcity during the Arctic winter. Diatoms also produce one of the main marine omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids that Calanus require to successfully survive and reproduce in the frozen Arctic waters. Calanus seasonally migrate into deeper waters to save energy and reduce their losses to predation in an overwintering process called diapause that is fuelled entirely by carbon-rich fat (lipids). This vertical 'lipid pump' transfers vast quantities of carbon into the ocean's interior and ultimately represents the draw-down of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), an important process within the global carbon cycle. Continued global warming throughout the 21st century is expected to exert a strong influence on the timing, magnitude and spatial distribution of diatom productivity in the Arctic Ocean. Little is known about how Calanus will respond to these changes, making it difficult to understand how the wider Arctic ecosystem and its biogeochemistry will be affected by climate change. The overarching goal of this proposal is to develop a predictive understanding of how Calanus in the Arctic will be affected by future climate change. We will achieve this goal through five main areas of research: We will synthesise past datasets of Calanus in the Arctic alongside satellite-derived data on primary production. This undertaking will examine whether smaller, more temperate species have been increasingly colonising of Arctic. Furthermore, it will consider how the timing of life-cycle events may have changed over past decades and between different Arctic regions. The resulting data will be used to validate modelling efforts. We will conduct field based experiments to examine how climate-driven changes in the quantity and omega-3 content of phytoplankton will affect crucial features of the Calanus life-cycle, including reproduction and lipid storage for diapause. Cutting-edge techniques will investigate how and why Calanus use stored fats to reproduce in the absence of food. The new understanding gained will be used to produce numerical models of Calanus' life cycle for future forecasting. The research programme will develop life-cycle models of Calanus and simulate present day distribution patterns, the timing of life-cycle events, and the quantities of stored lipid (body condition), over large areas of the Arctic. These projections will be compared to historical data. We will investigate how the omega-3 fatty acid content of Calanus is affected by the food environment and in turn dictates patterns of their diapause- and reproductive success. Reproductive strategies differ between the different species of Calanus and this approach provides a powerful means by which to predict how each species will be impacted, allowing us to identify the winners and losers under various scenarios of future environmental changes. The project synthesis will draw upon previous all elements of the proposal to generate new numerical models of Calanus and how the food environment influences their reproductive strategy and hence capacity for survival in a changing Arctic Ocean. This will allow us to explore how the productivity and biogeochemistry of the Arctic Ocean will change in the future. These models will be interfaced with the UK's Earth System Model that directly feeds into international efforts to understand global feedbacks to climate change.

Plate tectonics is a fundamental theory for explaining earthquakes, volcanoes, crustal deformation and therefore the motion at the Earth's surface. However very little is known about how destructive plate boundaries initiate, evolve and end. This is central to plate tectonics, as it is thought that the dominant driving force of plate motions is the gravitational pull of subducting plates. In the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, the Pacific and Australian plates are converging. In the north one subduction zone is nearing the end of its life cycle as anomalously buoyant oceanic plate is stalling subduction. To the south in the San Cristobal Trench, a new subduction zone has initiated in response to continued convergence of the Pacific and Australian plates, making this the perfect place to understand subduction initiation and cessation. In this urgency proposal we will deploy seismometers for 1 year to record aftershocks from sequence of 4 major earthquakes with magnitudes between 7.1-7.6. These recordings and other recordings of earthquakes from around the globe will allow us to delineate with high accuracy the plate interfaces of the new and old subducting slabs and image the slab structures at depth. The structure of the old and new subduction zones will illuminate the processes occurring at depth which are shifting the force balance in the region to reverse the sense of subduction. The proposed experiment will be enhanced by concurrent studies scheduled to be deployed in Fall of 2014, which includes a multimillion pound ocean bottom seismic deployment by colleagues in Japan. The combined array will allow us to image the Pacific plate which is stalling the subduction, allowing us to investigate what conditions are necessary for a plate to halt the descent of the slab into the mantle. Thus we will be able to understand how subduction stops and starts.

Copepod species of the genus Calanus (Calanus hereafter) are rice grain-sized crustaceans, distant relatives of crabs and lobsters, that occur throughout the Arctic Ocean consuming enormous quantities of microscopic algae (phytoplankton). These tiny animals represent the primary food source for many Arctic fish, seabirds and whales. During early spring they gorge on extensive seasonal blooms of diatoms, fat-rich phytoplankton that proliferate both beneath the sea ice and in the open ocean. This allows Calanus to rapidly obtain sufficient fat to survive during the many months of food scarcity during the Arctic winter. Diatoms also produce one of the main marine omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids that Calanus require to successfully survive and reproduce in the frozen Arctic waters. Calanus seasonally migrate into deeper waters to save energy and reduce their losses to predation in an overwintering process called diapause that is fuelled entirely by carbon-rich fat (lipids). This vertical 'lipid pump' transfers vast quantities of carbon into the ocean's interior and ultimately represents the draw-down of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), an important process within the global carbon cycle. Continued global warming throughout the 21st century is expected to exert a strong influence on the timing, magnitude and spatial distribution of diatom productivity in the Arctic Ocean. Little is known about how Calanus will respond to these changes, making it difficult to understand how the wider Arctic ecosystem and its biogeochemistry will be affected by climate change. The overarching goal of this proposal is to develop a predictive understanding of how Calanus in the Arctic will be affected by future climate change. We will achieve this goal through five main areas of research: We will synthesise past datasets of Calanus in the Arctic alongside satellite-derived data on primary production. This undertaking will examine whether smaller, more temperate species have been increasingly colonising of Arctic. Furthermore, it will consider how the timing of life-cycle events may have changed over past decades and between different Arctic regions. The resulting data will be used to validate modelling efforts. We will conduct field based experiments to examine how climate-driven changes in the quantity and omega-3 content of phytoplankton will affect crucial features of the Calanus life-cycle, including reproduction and lipid storage for diapause. Cutting-edge techniques will investigate how and why Calanus use stored fats to reproduce in the absence of food. The new understanding gained will be used to produce numerical models of Calanus' life cycle for future forecasting. The research programme will develop life-cycle models of Calanus and simulate present day distribution patterns, the timing of life-cycle events, and the quantities of stored lipid (body condition), over large areas of the Arctic. These projections will be compared to historical data. We will investigate how the omega-3 fatty acid content of Calanus is affected by the food environment and in turn dictates patterns of their diapause- and reproductive success. Reproductive strategies differ between the different species of Calanus and this approach provides a powerful means by which to predict how each species will be impacted, allowing us to identify the winners and losers under various scenarios of future environmental changes. The project synthesis will draw upon previous all elements of the proposal to generate new numerical models of Calanus and how the food environment influences their reproductive strategy and hence capacity for survival in a changing Arctic Ocean. This will allow us to explore how the productivity and biogeochemistry of the Arctic Ocean will change in the future. These models will be interfaced with the UK's Earth System Model that directly feeds into international efforts to understand global feedbacks to climate change.

It is well known that climate change is rapidly altering polar habitats. However, it is largely unknown how organisms in those habitats will evolve and adapt in response to climate change. This hampers efforts to predict future changes in marine ecosystems. This research will examine how diatoms, an important group of plankton in the Southern Ocean, adapt to environmental change. During a research cruise to the Southern Ocean, diatoms will be sampled from different regions of the Southern Ocean, including the Drake Passage, the Pacific Sector of the Southern Ocean and the Ross Sea. Samples will be processed to examine genetic diversity in the field. In the lab, evolution experiments will be conducted to measure the rates of adaptation to increasing temperature and ocean acidification. Data on the diversity of field populations combined with data on rates of adaptability will provide key insights into the "evolvability" of marine diatoms. This project will support a doctoral student and a postdoctoral researcher as well as several undergraduates. These scientists will learn the fundamentals of experimental evolution, a skill set that is sorely needed in the field of ocean climate change biology. The project also includes a collaboration with the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting. The Metcalf Institute will design and implement a session focused on current research related to evolution and climate change to be held at the annual conference of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW). Although it is well understood that climate change is rapidly altering polar habitats, the evolutionary response of cold-adapted, biogeochemically important phytoplankton is essentially unknown and represents a major knowledge gap that hampers efforts to predict future changes at the base of the marine food web. Both physiological and genetic variation are key parameters for understanding evolutionary processes in phytoplankton but they are essentially unknown for Southern Ocean diatoms. The extent of these two factors in field populations (physiological and genetic variation) and the interaction between them will influence how and whether cold-adapted diatoms can respond to changing environments. This project is focused on diatoms and includes a combination of a) field work to identify genetic diversity within diatoms across the Drake Passage, the Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean and the Ross Sea, b) experiments in the lab to assess the range of physiological variation in contemporary populations of diatoms and c) evolution experiments in the lab to assess how the combination of genetic diversity and physiological variation influence the evolutionary potential of diatoms under a changing environment. This research will uncover general relationships between physiological variation, genetic diversity, and evolutionary potential that may apply across microbial taxa and geographical regions, substantially improving efforts to predict shifts in marine ecosystems under global change. Results from this study can be integrated into developing models that incorporate evolution to predict ecosystem changes under future climate change scenarios. This project will support a doctoral student and a postdoctoral researcher as well as several undergraduates. These scientists will learn the fundamentals of experimental evolution, a skill set that is sorely needed in the field of ocean climate change biology. The project also includes a collaboration with the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting. The Metcalf Institute will design and implement a session focused on current research related to evolution and climate change to be held at the annual conference of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW).