Radiocarbon in the Anthropocene

Dr Ted Schuur is a Regents’ Professor in the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University. He is an ecologist who has studied links between ecosystems and climate in locations across Alaska and the Arctic. His work on this topic has included more than two decades of field research and, in this time, has resulted in more than 200 peer-reviewed publications in high-impact journals. He is the also the lead investigator for the Permafrost Carbon Network, an international consortium of researchers aimed at synthesizing new knowledge on permafrost carbon and climate. He graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BS from the University of Michigan and he received a PhD from the University of California-Berkeley. He is an elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

Professor Lihini Aluwihare, a chemical oceanographer, was born in Sri Lanka and lived in Zambia before moving to the United States for college and post-graduate studies. Arriving at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego in 2000, she studied the cycling of carbon and nitrogen in the oceans using light isotope tools and organic matter chemical characterisation. Aluwihare received her bachelor’s in chemistry and philosophy from Mount Holyoke College and her Ph.D. in Oceanography from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Oceanography.  Her research attempts to read the messages encoded in molecules that maintain microbial life, facilitate ecosystem interactions, and contribute to long-term carbon and nutrient storage. A common theme that underpins her work is her commitment to developing new analytical tools and research frameworks to provide new perspectives on dissolved organic matter cycling in aquatic environments. 

Dr Joanna Lester is a researcher and consultant in oceanography. She recently completed her PhD looking at recent changes in oceanic radiocarbon and CFCs. She used a selection of ocean models and tracer observations collected over the past 30 years to examine tracer changes and investigate their internal variability. Dr Lester collected radiocarbon samples across two Atlantic hydrographic sections as part of the research. Her work as a consultant has included many large-scale coastal modelling projects, shipping studies and innovation projects.

Edouard Bard is the Professor Chair in Climate and Ocean Evolution at the Collège de France, a member of the French Académie des Sciences and of the Academia Europaea, a foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences and of the Royal Academy of Belgium, and an honorary fellow of EGU, AGU, GSA and GS-EAG. Edouard Bard defended in 1987 his PhD focused on radiocarbon by accelerator mass spectrometry on modern seawater and on fossil foraminifera from marine sediments. He then worked as a postdoc at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (Columbia University, New-York) using U-Th dating of corals by mass spectrometry to study deglacial sea level changes and to extend the radiocarbon calibration beyond the Holocene. He served as a member of the IntCal working group since 1993. He leads the AixMICADAS radiocarbon unit and participate to programs on cosmogenic nuclides in polar ice cores by means of the ASTER 5MV facility, both AMS being located at CEREGE in Aix-en-Provence.

Samuel Hammer is a research scientist and Head of the Central Radiocarbon Laboratory (CRL) of the Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS) research infrastructure at Heidelberg University. Since the mid-2000s, he worked with urban greenhouse gas observations and introduced the continuous atmospheric hydrogen and in-situ FTIR observations at Heidelberg. His research focuses on interpreting 14C-based fossil-fuel CO2 observations and their uncertainties. In the ICOS pilot station framework, he and the ICOS CRL team investigates the applicability and the challenges of other fossil-fuel CO2 proxies like, e.g. CO, NOx, and APO.

Jocelyn Turnbull holds joint appointments as a Senior Scientist at GNS Science, New Zealand and a Research Associate at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. She leads the Rafter Radiocarbon Laboratory at GNS Science, the world’s oldest continuously operating radiocarbon facility. The laboratory maintains expertise in a wide range of radiocarbon applications, and Jocelyn’s research is primarily on the modern carbon cycle, particularly fossil fuel derived CO2. She uses radiocarbon and related tracers to understand the sources and sinks of greenhouse gases at the local, urban and regional scales. Current projects include CarbonWatch-NZ which aims to evaluate New Zealand’s natural and anthropogenic carbon budget; INFLUX, the Indianapolis Flux Project where methods for evaluating urban greenhouse gas emissions are being developed; and SOAR Southern Ocean Atmospheric Radiocarbon which uses radiocarbon measurements to understand the dynamics of Southern Ocean carbon exchange.

Jonathan Sanderman is an Associate Scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. Dr Sanderman is a biogeochemist who specialises in understanding how soil carbon and nutrient cycles have been altered by land-use and climate change. He is particularly interested in understanding the carbon sink capacity of soils and coastal sediments and whether or not these sinks can be managed to mitigate climate change. His more recent work has involved applying emerging concepts in data analytics to soil science to increase the availability of soil information and decrease the cost of monitoring and verification of soil carbon and soil health projects. Prior to joining the Center, Dr Sanderman spent six years as a research scientist at the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization focusing on soil carbon sequestration in agricultural soils. Dr Sanderman holds a BS from Brown University and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr Heather Graven is a Reader in the Department of Physics and the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. She worked previously at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA and at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Her research focuses on the use of atmospheric measurements to understand the global carbon cycle and its response to human activities and climate change. She uses radiocarbon and stable carbon isotopes to distinguish fossil fuel and biogenic influences on carbon dioxide and methane, and to investigate carbon cycling in the ocean and land biosphere.

Timothy Eglinton FRS is Professor of Biogeoscience within the Department of Earth Sciences at ETH Zürich. Eglinton obtained a BSc in Environmental Science at the Plymouth Polytechnic, and MSc and PhD in Organic Geochemistry at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.  Following postdoctoral research positions at Delft Technical University (Netherlands) and Oslo University (Norway), he joined Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1989. He was a member of the Scientific Staff there until 2010, when he joined ETH. Professor Eglinton’s research program is centered on tracing the origin, cycling and legacy of biospheric carbon, and to understand the role of organic matter production, remineralization, transport, and burial as a component of the global carbon cycle. He focusses on processes on the continents and in the oceans, as well as the transfer of carbon between these systems. He has pioneered radiocarbon measurements at the molecular level as a tool to examine carbon cycle processes.   More information is available at: http://www.biogeoscience.ethz.ch/.

Professor Susan Trumbore is Director of the Processes Department at the MPI for Biogeochemistry in Jena and part-time Professor of Earth System Science at UC Irvine.  Her research uses radiocarbon produced by nuclear weapons testing to trace the flow of carbon through vegetation and soils. She has also applied the high sensitivity and throughput capabilities of AMS to apply radiocarbon in field labelling experiments to determine rates and pathways of C flow in ecosystems.  Professor Trumbore is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the new open access journal AGU Advances.  She helps lead the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory, a Brazilian/German project to study land-atmosphere-climate interactions in central Amazon tropical forest, and AquaDiva that studies how water connects the surface and subsurface biosphere in Critical Zone Observatories in central Germany.