| Academic Year | 2024-2025 |
| sflanigan01@qub.ac.uk | |
| Institution | Queen's University, Belfast |
Biography
School: School of Natural and Built Environment
Pronouns: she/her
Name Pronunciation: Shin-ayd Flah-nih-gahn
Project: A Late Glacial and Holocene tephrostratigraphy for Antarctica
Supervisors: Gill Plunkett, Matteo Spagnolo & Andrew Newton
Undergraduate Education: BSc Geography, Queen’s University Belfast
Postgraduate Education: N/A
Research: Ice cores are a key resource for many scientific fields, their record of various preserved materials can be used to reconstruct past climates, sea level and various other factors. My project aims to find and identify tephra stored in the Fletcher ice core, a 654 m long core collected from West Antarctica. I will be focussing on tephra layers deposited during the Late glacial and Holocene. Using geochemical fingerprinting of the tephra, the deposits will be correlated with tephra records from previous studies, this will enable me to determine the event from which the tephra was generated.
Investigating tephra improves our understanding of volcanic events by helping to create a robust record of tephra deposits. This expands our knowledge of isochrons and enables the correlation of marine and terrestrial records, improving the dating of climatological events. There are several other applications that can also be explored when studying tephra such as understanding ash cloud behaviour, improving hazard projection and helping to better understand how Earth systems can be impacted changing climate.
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