DeepDust

The Permian period (299–252 million years ago) witnessed the collapse of the Late Paleozoic Ice Age (LPIA) and the transition into one of the most pronounced greenhouse intervals in Earth’s history, culminating in the most severe mass extinction event of the Phanerozoic. Furthermore, marked climate and carbon cycle fluctuations on orbital time scales during the LPIA and the late Permian recorded in geological archives offer the opportunity to study the state-dependence of the Earth system to astronomical forcing. Improving our understanding of these phenomena is one of the aims of the ICDP-funded initiative "The Deep Dust Drilling Project: Earth- System Responses to the Penultimate Icehouse Collapse and Greenhouse Intensification (Deep Dust)", with the accompanying PhD project proposed here focusing on coupled climate/ice-sheet/carbon cycle simulations. Our goal in the project is to put the data from the Deep Dust drill core(s) and other archives into their spatial and temporal context, thus elucidating the key mechanisms and feedbacks behind the observed changes. We plan to do so by running equilibrium Earth-system model simulations for time intervals spanning the Permian to trace Earth’s climate evolution from the icehouse into the hothouse, and by comparing model results with proxy data. A range of sensitivity simulations will explore the effects of individual climate forcings and the uncertainties arising from poorly constrained boundary conditions and key model parameters. Finally, transient coupled climate/ice-sheet/carbon cycle simulations will investigate the mechanisms and feedbacks behind fluctuations on orbital time scales during the LPIA and during the warm late Permian, thus comparing astronomically-driven variations in Earth’s climate during very different baseline states.