GNS Science researchers awarded over $1.6 million from Marsden Fund
GNS Science and its research partners have been successful in bids to the Marsden Fund — Te Pūtea Rangahau a Marsden, for three projects totalling $1.664m.
The Marsden Fund is administered by the Royal Society Te Apārangi.
The projects range from research to understand how Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets melt and interact to rise global sea level, to investigation into seismic activity in the Southern Alps, and plugging knowledge gaps on thermoelectric generators. Each project is summarised below:
Standard Project: Quest for flexible thermoelectric generators: modulation of material's crystal symmetry and anisotropy
(Awarded: $944,000)
GNS Project Lead: Dr Peter Murmu
With the explosive growth of portable, flexible, and wearable electronics there is a huge opportunity for green energy harvesting from ambient heat sources and curved surfaces. Currently, inorganic thermoelectric materials show promise for efficiently harvesting energy, but they are inherently inflexible and brittle.
To overcome this current limitation, this project will develop sustainable inorganic thermoelectric materials that display both inherent mechanical flexibility and high thermoelectric performance.
GNS Science Material Scientist and Project Lead Dr Peter Murmu says that the weak chemical bonding in the crystal structure could be the key to enhancing the flexibility of high performing thermoelectric materials.
"Our research will close the knowledge gap by developing a strategy for making highly anisotropic thermoelectric materials and explore the link between strain and chemical bonding in the crystal structure. We aim to enable the development of materials for flexible electronics within large-scale and wearable technological applications," says Dr Murmu.
This project is led by GNS Science, with Associate Investigators Dr John Kennedy (GNS), Professor Lihua Tang (University of Auckland), Professor Takao Mori (National Institute for Materials Science in Japan), and Professor Zhigang Chen (Queensland University of Technology).
Early Career Fast-Start Project: Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheet contribution to sea level
(Awarded: $360,000)
GNS Project Lead: Dr Georgia Grant
Rising sea level from melting ice sheets will not be even across Earth’s oceans. The degree of sea-level rise in any one location depends on whether the meltwater comes from the Greenland or Antarctic polar ice sheets. This ‘sea level fingerprint’ means that sea level will rise more in New Zealand if the meltwater comes from Greenland rather than Antarctica, so understanding how the Greenland Ice Sheet behaves is crucial for Aotearoa.
It's not just global warming that impacts ice sheet advance and retreat. They’re known to be affected by subtle changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun. What remains unclear is whether the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets respond together (in-phase) or separately (out-of-phase) to these orbital cycles.
Dr Grant’s research will assess the orbital paced cycles in new sediment cores from near the Greenland Ice Sheet. The study will focus on past periods of warmer climate, providing a window to the warming climate of our near future.
“These sediment cores are the first opportunity to determine whether the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets respond in-phase during warmer climates, providing critical insight into how the meltwater from polar ice sheets will impact the global distribution of sea level,” says Dr Grant.
“While we’re seeing increasing temperatures today, we don’t expect the ice sheets will melt in a linear or even fashion. We really need to understand exactly how each polar ice sheet responds to physical drivers including changes in Earth’s orbit, to understand how human induced climate warming may differ the response in the future.”
This project is led by GNS, with Associate Investigators Professor Robert McKay (Victoria University of Wellington), Professor Stephen Meyers (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Dr Paolo Stocchi (Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research), Dr Molly Patterson (Binghamton University, SUNY), Dr Edward Gasson (University of Exeter), Dr Benjamin Keisling (University of Texas, Austin).
Early Career Fast-Start Project: Filling the seismic-hazard gap - unravelling earthquake activity in the Southern Alps, New Zealand
(Awarded: $360,000)
GNS Project Lead: Dr Genevieve Coffey
Many faults have been mapped throughout the central Southern Alps but very little is known about their activity. Understanding how active and how much displacement these alps are capable of hosting is important for modelling potential earthquakes and their impacts on the area.
Bedrock faulting and rapid erosion of past earthquake evidence means traditional methods for investigating past earthquakes, like radiocarbon dating, cannot be applied. This project will use cutting-edge novel methods to investigate whether faults in the Southern Alps are active, how much slip they may experience during earthquakes, and what downstream effects they could have to nearby communities.
GNS Paleoseismologist and Project Lead Genevieve Coffey said unravelling information about the timing and size of earthquakes in the central Southern Alps will develop a more complete picture of active faulting across the country.
“With the development of increasingly sophisticated tools for understanding the pattern of earthquakes and seismic hazard across Aotearoa New Zealand, such as the recent update of the New Zealand National Seismic Hazard Model, we also need to improve the underlying datasets that are foundational for these tools,” Dr Coffey said.
“Through this research, we hope to fill important knowledge gaps and enrich data that will underpin next-generation numerical seismic models and help to increase New Zealand’s resilience to earthquakes.”
This project is led by GNS Science, with Associate Investigators Dr Carolyn Boulton (Victoria University of Wellington) and Dr Stephen Ellis Cox (Columbia University).
ENDS