Blanca Ausín is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Salamanca (Spain). She is an Oceanographer and Paleoclimatologist with an interest in addressing multidisciplinary research (paleo)oceanographic questions at different time scales merging observational, analytical, and modeling approaches and different aspects of the carbon cycle. During her postdoctoral positions at ETH Zurich (Switzerland), Blanca revealed that hydrodynamic particle sorting processes exert a ubiquitous influence on the radiocarbon age of sedimentary organic carbon in the world’s oceans. Her work has provided a generic framework that may guide the assessment of organic carbon burial and constrain the extent to which down-core variations in sedimentary records reflect hydrodynamic changes versus derived proxy signals. Her work also implies a major step towards quantifying the impact of allochthonous inputs on paleoclimate signals and our ability to provide reliable paleoclimate reconstructions. Blanca is currently leading PASSAGE, a project funded by the European Union (ERC, No. 101039348) that explores the radiocarbon signatures of specific particles that record climate information to elucidate biases in climate records and refine climate interpretations. Last November, the PASSAGE team and collaborators successfully deployed two mooring lines during the oceanographic cruise PASSAGE23 to study transport pathways of marine sediments by deploying mooring lines in the SW Iberian margin. Blanca is the Head of the Biogeosciences Laboratory at the University of Salamanca (BIG), focused on the analyses of marine and terrestrial biomarkers typically employed for reconstructing past climates and their purification for further radiocarbon dating. For more information, please visit the webpage: https://passage.usal.es/
Origin, transport, and fate of proxy particles in the ocean: implications for paleoclimate reconstructions
Marine sedimentary sequences are one of the best archives of past global climate changes. However, recent studies suggest that some sedimentary components commonly used as climate proxies are displaced to a considerable extent by advection, which implies potential spatiotemporal biases in the derived climate records. The latter raises important questions on the fidelity of the climate reconstructions derived from such proxy-bearing particles. To date, a direct assessment of particle provenance and transport pathways has remained elusive. Here, I will present the results from global and regional studies to shed light on the controls on the origin, (re-)distribution, and fate of organic matter and other inorganic sedimentary components that encapsulate climate information and are used to reconstruct past climate variability. Our work aims to address the complex interplay among biological, physicochemical, and geological processes that determine the abundance and geochemical signatures of proxy particles in the modern ocean and the sedimentary record. Our research aims to improve our ability to reliably interpret short-term climate variability by gaining detailed knowledge of particle transport modes and assessing their potential to bias inferred climate signals.
