Mauro Pau, Post Doctoral Fellow

Past employee
mauro.pau@uit.no
The Role of Ice Ages

His current research focuses on the effects of glacial lake outburst floods on the ocean circulation. During the last glacial period, northern Eurasia was covered by an extensive ice sheet complex, its margins damming vast proglacial lakes. Mauro will carry out numerical sensitivity experiments to constrain the effect of a massive input of freshwater into the ocean, subsequent to glacial dam failure. The resulting freshwater perturbation would have stabilised the water column, and thus may have inhibited North Atlantic Deep Water production and weakened the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, with feedback effects on the climate. The findings of this research project would help to elucidate complex interactions between ice sheets, ocean circulation and climate. They can potentially allow to gain insight also on future climate change, considering the projected melting rates for the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Mauro holds a PhD from the centre for the Physics of Geological Processes (PGP) at the University of Oslo, Norway. His dissertation investigates the origin and evolution of seabed pockmarks, crater-like features linked to the response of gas-hydrate-bearing systems to glacial climate instability. Prior to that, he received two MSc degrees; one in Meteorology, Physical Oceanography and Climate from the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht (IMAU) at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and one in Geological Sciences from the University of Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy. During his career, he enjoyed various opportunities to integrate fieldwork, computer modelling and laboratory experiments.