Postdoc opportunity: Polar benthic ecology and climate change

Are you interested in studying how climate change and warming oceans will affect life on the sea floor?

Our colleague Markus Molis is looking for an early career researcher who wants to study colonisation, settlement, climate drivers, and effect on marine ecosystems of elevated benthic temperatures in Arctic Norway. 

Panels like this have already been deployed in Antarctica, New Zealand and the UK, but never in the Arctic, offering an opportunity to generate unique new scientific insights.

The project involves 16 heated settlement panels covering a temperature range of +0 to +3 degrees that were installed in September 2024 in a fjord near Tromsø at a depth of 10 metres (see photo below).

 The project supervisor will be Markus Molis, Professor for Arctic Coastal Ecology at iC3’s host institution, UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

The project will run in collaboration with David Barnes from the British Antarctic Survey and Jakob Tyrring from Aarhus University. A parallel project involving heated panels in the North Sea will provide comparative data. 

There is currently no internal funding for this project. The candidate will have to apply for MSCA funding with the support of Markus Molis. The candidate is likely to be included in the university’s Arctic MSCA programme, which provides strong support in writing winning MSCA proposals, significantly boosting the candidate’s chances of securing funding.

This opportunity is open to candidates of all nationalities who already have a PhD, or who will complete their PhD in the coming months. 

Please email Markus Molis your CV along with a one-page project proposal indicating theoretical backgroud, objectives, and methodological approach of your planned research using the heated panel set-up.

Relevant publications:

·       1 °C warming increases spatial competition frequency and complexity in Antarctic marine macrofauna | Communications Biology 

·       Warming by 1°C Drives Species and Assemblage Level Responses in Antarctica’s Marine Shallows - ScienceDirect

 Note: Markus Molis is not a member of the iC3 team, and this postdoc will not form part of iC3. However, our host university is ranked #1worldwide in terms of Arctic-related scientific publications. We are advertising this exciting opportunity because we think that many of our readers will find it interesting.