Eloise Littley

Biography

In 2015 she graduated from Edinburgh University with a first class degree in Environmental Geoscience (BSc). Key areas covered oceanography, hydrogeology, geochemistry and environmental change and gave me some fantastic fieldwork opportunities in northwest Scotland, Jamaica and Mexico. A year later she started her PhD here at St Andrews under the supervision of Dr. James Rae and Dr. Andrea Burke, taking these themes and applying them to the abrupt climate change of the last glacial period.

Research Interest

rapid climate change events that occurred from ~20-60kyr. These abrupt shifts in Northern hemisphere climate, known as the Dansgaard-Oeschger events and Heinrich Stadials are characterised by considerable temperature changes over a period of about 50 years. The North Atlantic Ocean has, for a few decades now, been recognised as a major control of these events, linked to the changes in Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and atmospheric dynamics. Little understood however, is how the biogeochemistry of the North Atlantic Ocean responded to climate change and whether or not it played a role in associated CO2 fluctuations.