Profile

I have always liked spending time outdoors whether just walking, hiking somewhere remote, cycling, cross country skiing, snowboarding, swimming in lakes/rivers/seas or just having a cup of tea somewhere quiet surrounded by nature.

I work particularly with greenhouse gas emissions from permafrost and focus on the degradation of organic matter (which means remains of plants and other organisms). Some of the organic matter might have been frozen in the Arctic soils since the last ice age! When permafrost thaws, microbes start to degrade this organic matter and that can add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

My work in the Maldives is focused on quantifying storage of organic matter in seagrass meadows. We study sediment cores taken from seabed and analyse how much carbon they store. Seagrasses can help to keep carbon away from the atmosphere where they could add to greenhouse gas emissions.

I analyse samples (usually water or sediment or soil) for different parameters such as how much organic carbon they have as this carbon can be turned into greenhouse gases and emitted in the atmosphere. I also use different isotopes which are like fingerprints for different materials, they can tell us how old (the organic carbon in) the soil or sediment is or where it came from (whether from land or sea).