Tom Chalk

@chalkyoceans.bsky.social

1052 Followers 269 Following

Dr Chalk, destined to be a researcher of carbonates. CO2, & ocean-climate links, resident isotope geochemist @exoceanlab.bsky.social, @cerege.bsky.social, France. Equalist, technologist, environmentalist. #climatevegan 🌱. 🇬🇧🤝🇲🇫. 🏳️‍🌈 but always with the 🏳️‍⚧️.

Part of the #legolab team, lego Jaime and lego Tom start looking at some new lego sediment core. They are surrounded by the tools of their trade; a giant 3D printed foram and lego mass spectrometer.
Look carefully! Fish carefully! A picture of a totally trashed plankton net and the legs of two very tired scientists.
Tom walking towards the camera and talking (no sound) whilst gesticulating wildly.
A jar of deep sea mud sitting on a height adjustable stand. It has microprobes to measure oxygen (respiration, photosynthesis) and pH (dissolution, precipitation, also respiration etc...) at tiny intervals to see what is going on right at the grain interface.
Marine and Olivier cutting the core into slices, at the top it can be really liquid and gooey, so we keep it vertically, but lower down it can be almost like a rock. Despite the complaining from Olivier both of them are remarkably mud-free!
Tom holding a surface interface core, like a proud father. The core includes the top layer of mud, with the bottom layer of ocean, including all the creatures living there (and more importantly for Tom, the ones long dead too). Disclaimer: Tom does not get seasick.
Snap-shot of all the happy faces at the hybrid PAGES workshop which took place in Bergen, 2022.
A figure showing the relative importance of different error sources through time which impact the d11B-CO2 proxy. In general the most important are: analytical, disequilibrium, sea water isotope composition and species calibration.
@chalkyoceans and Maxime on a boat fishing forams.
Anta delivering her #ICP15 talk in Bengaluru.
Ooops, a foot pic. Sporting Bermuda pride sock.
Me on the beach, trying to match my hair to the (sub) tropical waters.
Four plots showing low to high latitude foraminifera and their current temperature and calcite saturation niches. We project how these niches will change with climate under a "best case" scenario (SSP2-4.5) over the next century. Whilst high latitude niches change, they are still within the tolerances of modern foraminifera, however, in low latitudes temperature-saturation conditions are unlike anything currently experiences by planktic foraminifera in the modern ocean, putting them at risk of regional extinction.