Luke C. Skinner

The 2006 Outstanding Young Scientist Award is awarded to Luke C. Skinner for the application of multidisciplinary palaeoceanographic studies to investigate questions such as the conditions of deep ocean water circulation and changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Luke Skinner has taken a highly successful broad and interdisciplinary approach to climatic and oceanographic change over the past 30,000 years. His research includes the physical and engineering problems associated with collecting cores of deep-sea sediment. An imaginative use of the geochemical method whereby the proportion of magnesium incorporated in the calcite shell of a protozoan (foraminifer) reflects the water temperature where the organism lived. He has taken the geochemical data further in applications of numerical modelling and to use models to investigate questions such as to what extent changes in conditions in the deep North Atlantic controlled natural changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.