DURHAM UNIVERSITY

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-07

The receding Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) is now the largest contributor to global sea-level rise. A major driving force behind this recession is the encroachment of warm ocean water through fjords to the faces of marine-terminating outlet glaciers (MTOGs) that drain the ice sheet. Satellite data confirm that these glaciers have thinned, accelerated and retreated over the past few decades, but with significant temporal and spatial variability. Despite this information, our ability to predict how, and at what rate, the ice sheet will respond to future warming is made difficult by a lack of direct observations from these remote and often ice-infested areas and by the limited time-series of existing datasets. Constraining Greenland's likely decay trajectory is necessary to evaluate policy options with regard to its contribution to sea level rise. However, the wider effects of this decay also encompass the marine environments bordering the landmass. Increasing the supply of freshwater to these areas (as meltwater and icebergs) alters circulation patterns and impacts North Atlantic weather systems, including those affecting the UK. It also brings nutrients to offshore areas that promote marine productivity, which in turn has the potential to draw down more atmospheric CO2 and bury organic carbon in fjord and shelf sediments. To date, these processes have not been quantified and we need to improve our understanding of this negative feedback to climate change before it can be incorporated into predictive models. One way to determine which ice-ocean-marine ecosystem scenarios are analogues for future warming scenarios is to extend the record of modern observations back over the last 11,700 years of the Holocene using proxies from marine sediment cores. A few records of 20th Century iceberg calving and warm water encroachment exist around Greenland but there are no comprehensive, coupled records of past glacier change, ocean warming and marine productivity for earlier periods. Here, we propose to generate these long-term records for the Holocene era for a key location in SE Greenland (Kangerlussuaq Fjord) calibrated by observations of the present-day system over three annual cycles. We will then use numerical modelling constrained by our new data to test how the Greenland Ice Sheet responded to climatic warming during the Holocene, particularly during the Holocene Thermal Maximum when summer temperatures were analogous to those predicted for 2100. We will acquire a full suite of oceanographic, biological and geological observations during a 6-week multidisciplinary cruise to SE Greenland on the UK's new polar research vessel, the RRS Sir David Attenborough, making full use of its state-of-the-art capabilities as a logistical platform. We will use cruise datasets to determine modern interactions between warm water inflows and glacial meltwater outflows, and to quantify marine productivity, sedimentation and nutrient cycling. At the same time, we will collect long and short marine-sediment cores and terrestrial rock samples to constrain past changes in glacier dynamics and derive coupled proxy records of ocean temperatures and carbon burial/storage. To do this, we will calibrate the sediment-core signals with our modern observations using an anchored mooring and repeat observations.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-06

Electrical engineering, through power electronics, machines and drives, underpins all renewable electricity generation, conversion and integration. The drive to achieve higher power and higher efficiency, use more sustainable materials, and provide greater control and reliability for next generation renewables relies on rapid step changes in technology for the underlying power electronics, machines, drives and control systems (PEMD). The drive for improved efficiency in industry alongside the increasing electrification of transport and heating and cooling is encouraging the development of PEMD in academia and industry. The UK government and industry are building the skills, knowledge and supply chain to support these sectors, but sustainable renewable generation is making slow progress towards the PEMD technology that is needed to underpin next generation renewables. N-ZEEE will bring together for the first time the diverse and disparate research activity in emerging electrical engineering for next-generation renewables to form a coherent community of engineers that can empower significant change in the approach to this critical and enabling field. N-ZEEE will be a community of academia, industry, policy makers and wider stakeholders to ensure cross-sector technology transfer in addition to renewables-specific developments that will enable next generation wind, marine, photovoltaic and novel future energy generation and allow the UK to deliver its energy and climate priorities and pioneer underpinning PEMD research. The N-ZEEE Network will enable the transition to future PEMD generation, conversion and integration technologies by: 1. Building a strong academic and industrial research community focused on delivering next-generation-enabling PEMD technologies by fostering new relationships and building on established relationships to grow an extensive and coherent network of knowledge, research and practice. 2. Providing a network of research excellence in enabling PEMD technology leading to a Supergen Hub of excellence in PEMD whilst enhancing existing and future sector-focused Supergen Hubs. The current hub model has a patchwork of narrowly-focused PEMD research into application-specific technology; instead, N-ZEEE will provide a centre of critical mass that can be tapped into by existing and future sector-specific Hubs. 3. Creating a Network within which cross-cutting themes will strengthen the UK's ability to develop next-generation-enabling PEMD technology for renewable generation, conversion and integration. The Network will nurture the integration of ideas between different PEMD fields (e.g. electric automotive and aviation), creating a community that can make the rapid progress required to achieve net-zero within the critical timescales. 4. Providing support for early career researchers to build solid relationships and develop their networking expertise so that they can drive forward future research in enabling electrical engineering. The early career researchers of today will be supported to become the research leaders of tomorrow. 5. Providing a forum for doctoral students researching PEMD within existing application-focused Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) to come together to share ideas and develop their networks in an open and constructive environment (e.g. Aura, IDCORE, Sustainable Electric Propulsion, ReNU).

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-06

"Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) affect around 1 in 6 people worldwide, mostly from the poorest communities of the ‘global south’. Of these, the WHO acknowledges the parasite mediated NTDs leishmaniasis and Chagas disease as amongst the most neglected, impacting millions every year. These diseases are frequently lethal if untreated, and often disable survivors, with both medical and multi-B$ economic consequences in the endemic countries and beyond. Current drugs have serious, potentially fatal, side-effects, are difficult to administer where most needed (remote regions of developing nations), and where available, drug-resistant parasite strains are now arising. Part of the ‘neglect’ concerns our poor understanding of these biologically complex diseases, which require a considerable, prolonged and coordinated programme of research. Our response, the MRC GCRF-funded Global Network for NTDs, brought together over 500 researchers from 13 institutes around the world, via new collaborative research teams focussed on leishmaniasis and Chagas disease. The Network sought to democratise and decolonise the field, through growing laboratory research capacity and expertise in endemic countries across Asia and South America. The team comprised early career and senior researchers from all the associated nations, plus professional support colleagues. We established coordinated laboratory projects, sharing expertise, knowledge and skills, and have been described by many members as a family’. We have made significant scientific advances, moreover our cross-disciplinary partnerships between endemic country scientists have demonstrated globally equitable working practice. This exemplar brought in and influenced private sector collaborators – revealing the Network’s most tangible legacy and impact.‘"

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-06

The time-dependent systems are described with differential equations (either ordinary or partial differential equations). These systems are everywhere from ocean and atmospheric flows to financial markets or biological models. To know their behaviour, we need to solve the differential equations by integrating them in time. We often do this numerically using our computational resources. Such computation for complicated systems like weather models is very demanding and takes a long time. To lower the computational time, in modern scientific computing we parallelise the computational tasks and assign them to different processors that compute them simultaneously. However, there is a big obstacle in the parallisation of time integration for solving differential equations. Time integration is a sequential process, in which computing the solution at any timestep requires the solution at previous timesteps. Hence, it cannot be parallelised easily. The efficient time integration of nonlinear multi-timescale systems poses an additional challenge. The fast modes of these systems are coupled with the slow modes and finding their solution requires very small timesteps that slow down the overall computation. This project addresses these two challenges (parallelisation of time integration and fast oscillations) by developing a novel parallel time integrator that efficiently computes the solution of nonlinear multi-timescale systems. The method that we plan to develop considers the differential equations averaged over the phase of fast oscillations. The averaging is done in a systematic way such that it will be easy to retrieve the fast dynamics from the averaged solution. The biggest advantage of this averaging is to allow taking larger times without compromising too much on the accuracy or the solution blowing up due to numerical instabilities. The averaging itself, however, introduces a new type of error in computation. To mitigate this effect, we iteratively correct the averaged solution by lowering the averaging window. A part of our method's novelty is designing these correction layers in a way that can be computed in parallel and hence using several processors to lower to the overall computation time. After developing our method and testing it on simple examples, we apply it to a model of shallow waters that incorporates fast waves and slow vortices. This can be a stepping-stone for the application of the proposed method in more complicated geophysical flows in the ocean and weather prediction models.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-06

We often hear that humans are 'the great tool users'. Our ability to create and use tools sets us apart in the animal kingdom. All human cultures make tools and no other animal uses tools with the complexity and diversity as us. Our homes, smartphones, biomedicine, and transport are products of tool innovation. It is particularly puzzling then that children seem to remarkably bad tool innovators. Over a decade of intense research has shown that children find making simple tools strikingly hard, and they fail to solve tool innovation tasks that crows or orangutans can easily do so. As a result, many have concluded that children are 'poor innovators'. The flagship measure of tool innovation in children is the hook task. This requires reshaping a pipecleaner into a hook to fish a basket from within a transparent tube. This task was originally developed for western children (predominantly UK, USA and Germany), where almost all 4-5-year-olds fail, over half of 7-8-year-olds are unsuccessful, and even a third of 11-year-old children in these populations fail. The hook task has been subsequently administered to children in several non-western cultures. Results show that these children also struggle, and that those in remote small-scale societies (e.g., Congo, South Africa, Vanuatu) show much lower success rates than western children. Indeed, in some populations, no children at all were successful. However, taking tasks that are developed for western children to non-western populations is almost certainly biasing results and leads to erroneous, potentially damaging conclusions. For example, some researchers suggest that lack of schooling or differences in cognitive flexibility (the ability to switch between tasks and actions) may explain why non-western children struggle so much at tool innovation. But, there are lots of reasons to suspect that children outside of postindustralised populations should be equally or more innovative with tools than western children. Children in western populations are often exposed to materials such as pipecleaners and plastic tubes from a young age, while the non-western children had never seen them before. Likewise, children in the postindustrialsed west are exposed to (increasingly digital) premanufactured toys and structured educational systems in which they engage in tool use under close adult supervision. This reliance on premade toys and learning tool use from adults may reduce opportunities for developing innovative skills. Conversely, children in non-postindustrialed societies typically have less exposure to premanufactured toys and frequently engage in self-initiated learning. Indeed, anthropologists have shown that children in small-scale societies are highly innovative, making and modifying tools in play and work. This suggests that in contrast to studies using the hook task the environments these children develop in may in fact promote tool innovation skills. This project will develop, for the first time, culturally fair measures of tool innovation for 4-12-year-old children in four geographically and culturally diverse populations; urban Western children (UK), two small-scale subsistence societies (Congo) and a rural Indigenous population (Australia). With with a team of experts it will first establish appropriate measures of tool innovation for each culture by observing children to study the natural contexts in which they engage in making and using tools and interviewing local community members to understand how and when they use and value innovation. This data will be used to design culturally grounded tool innovation measures, carefully refining them through piloting and community feedback to ensure they are the maximally appropriate. We will then administer them to all populations to fairly study how tool innovation develops across the world. Crucially, the entire project process will be documented so future cross-cultural researchers have guidelines to improve their research.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-06

In the face of escalating climate crises, exemplified by devastating wildfires in Greece and Italy, a severe heat wave in India, and ash-covered New York from Canadian forest fires, scientists warn of accelerated risks. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) may collapse earlier than anticipated, signalling profound shifts in climate patterns (IPCC 2022). This reinforces the urgent recognition of climate change as the paramount threat to humanity and cultural heritage (ICOMOS 2021). By 2050, climate change is predicted to significantly impact both natural (Stocker et al., 2014) and historically built environments (UNEP, 2016). Despite this, the understanding of physical environmental risks to cultural heritage remains incomplete, hindering the development of effective adaptation and mitigation strategies. UNESCO defines cultural heritage comprehensively, encompassing tangible, natural, and intangible elements. The WRENCH project builds upon this definition, conceiving heritage as a complex interplay of material and immaterial legacies within landscapes and the narratives woven around them. WRENCH challenges the separation of material and immaterial aspects, emphasizing their dialectic and performative interconnectedness. Whether embodied in a colossal dam, as seen in the Vajont Dam Disaster (1963), or in the narratives of modernization etched into landscapes, material structures and stories are inseparable. The project contends that storytelling, through established arts, texts, or experimental practices, holds equal cultural significance to traditional monuments. The transient heritage of cityscapes, streets, and buildings, imbued with the narratives we craft, is as vital as tangible structures like churches. WRENCH pursues a dual objective: (a) to formulate a transdisciplinary methodology uniting environmental sciences, engineering, and humanities to assess the impact of climate change on both material and immaterial heritage and (b) to leverage heritage as a storytelling tool, rendering climate change risks visible and enhancing public awareness. The transdisciplinary methodology of WRENCH encompasses several key components: (1) Advanced Climate Modelling: Utilizing state-of-the-art climate models for data analysis, extracting historical data, and projecting future hydrometeorological variables. (2) Physical Testing and Structural Modelling: Investigating the impact of extreme environmental conditions on historical materials and structures through in-situ physical testing, rheological model development, and advanced structural modelling. (3) Immaterial Heritage Assessment: Employing historical methodologies, including archival research, oral history, and audiovisual materials, alongside participatory research involving local communities. (4) Holistic Framework Development: Creating a comprehensive framework for evaluating the effects of climate change on cultural heritage. Through this multifaceted approach, WRENCH aims to deepen our understanding of climate change's repercussions on heritage while utilizing storytelling as a potent means to communicate and foster awareness.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-06

One of the pillars of the currently favoured cosmological model (called Lambda Cold Dark Matter, or LCDM), is the elusive substance known as dark matter, which is thought to make up most of the mass of the Universe. While the existence of dark matter can be inferred through its gravitational influence on normal matter -- such as the stars and gas observed in galaxies -- its fundamental nature remains, as of yet, unknown. Via its gravitational influence, dark matter affects the motions of stars in the discs of spiral galaxies in two intriguing ways: i) it stabilises these stellar discs against the formation of elongated, rotating structures, called galactic 'bars' and, ii) when such galactic bars do form, dark matter inflicts a frictional force on them, which causes them to rotate more slowly with the passage of time. Due to this intimate interplay between galactic bars and dark matter particles, the properties of bars will be highly dependent on the existence and nature of dark matter. Therefore, the observed properties of bars in galaxies, such as the one that lies at the heart of our own Milky Way, can help in revealing the properties of dark matter, thus shedding light on its fundamental nature. While LCDM has been very successful at explaining observations at large cosmological scales, the model has a number of issues when scrutinised at "small", i.e. galactic, scales. Furthermore, while particle physicists have been searching for cold dark matter candidate particles for decades, no such particle has, as of yet, been discovered. This has motivated the community to explore alternatives to cold dark matter, which resolve some of the aforementioned "small scale" issues. However, there is still a lack of quantitative theoretical predictions for how these different dark matter candidates affect the dynamical properties of barred galaxies, such as our own Milky Way. Furthermore, our understanding of the dynamical structure of our galaxy is currently undergoing a major paradigm shift, thanks to superb data from the Gaia satellite and from large ground-based spectroscopic surveys. With this UKRI FLF I aim to disentangle the nature of dark matter, by making use of the interactions between galactic bars and dark matter in spiral galaxies, such as our own Milky Way. This will involve a three-pronged strategy: Firstly, I will decipher the dynamical structure of the Milky Way itself by using state-of-the-art models, together with data from Gaia and upcoming spectroscopic surveys, such as 4MOST and DESI. Secondly, I will produce, for the first time, theoretical predictions of the dynamical properties of barred galaxies in alternative dark matter frameworks. To do this, I will develop state-of-the-art cosmological simulations in these different dark matter scenarios, tailored to stellar dynamical studies. Developing such predictions is only now becoming possible, thanks to advances in numerical simulations which allow us to study bar dynamics in the full cosmological context. Finally, I will compare these novel theoretical predictions to the observed dynamical structure of the Milky Way and other nearby spiral galaxies, thus shedding light on the nature of dark matter.