PhD position in Investigating Offshore Groundwater Hydrology and Submarine Groundwater Discharge (f/ in Sylt

Job Description

The Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) is a member of the Helmholtz Association (HGF) and funded by federal and state government. AWI focuses on polar and marine research in a variety of disciplines such as biology, oceanography, geology, geochemistry and geophysics thus allowing multidisciplinary approaches to scientific goals.

PhD position in Investigating Offshore Groundwater Hydrology and Submarine Groundwater Discharge (f/x/m/d)

Background

Within the international JPI Oceans project AQUA-SHELF – A Proof-of-Concept Scientific Drilling Campaign for Offshore Freshened Groundwater Systems, we seek a highly motivated PhD candidate to investigate offshore freshened groundwater (OFG), submarine groundwater discharge (SGD), and their connection to coastal groundwater systems.

OFG represents an important but still poorly understood component of coastal groundwater systems. Key questions concern its origin and age, hydraulic connectivity with terrestrial aquifers, and its potential expression as groundwater discharge at the seafloor. AQUA-SHELF combines the first dedicated European offshore drilling campaign targeting OFG with geochemical, hydrogeological and geophysical investigations.

Well-characterised SGD sites in the Baltic Sea will serve as natural laboratories for developing and testing monitoring approaches using hydroacoustic mapping, environmental sensors and targeted sediment and pore-water sampling. The monitoring and detection approaches developed in the Baltic Sea will subsequently be applied and adapted to the northern Adriatic Sea, where AQUA-SHELF will conduct the first dedicated European offshore drilling campaign to investigate offshore freshened groundwater.

These scientific boreholes will provide direct access to offshore aquifers and enable the collection of groundwater, pore-water and sediment samples from different depths. A central component of the PhD will be the geochemical and isotopic characterisation of these samples to constrain groundwater origin and age, freshwater–seawater mixing, recharge conditions and residence times. The overall aim is to better understand whether offshore groundwater in the northern Adriatic represents a largely isolated palaeo-groundwater resource or remains dynamically connected to modern coastal groundwater systems.

The position will be based at the AWI Wadden Sea Station on Sylt and embedded in an interdisciplinary research environment covering coastal geology, marine environmental research and coastal processes.

The PhD project will be closely linked to the international AQUA-SHELF consortium and will involve collaboration particularly with Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) for groundwater geochemistry and isotope hydrology and Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (CAU) for marine geophysical investigations.

You will spend research periods at partner institutions and participate in joint marine field campaigns. The project therefore provides the opportunity to combine marine fieldwork, autonomous environmental monitoring, geochemistry and interdisciplinary data integration within one PhD project.