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Dr Colin P. Summerhayes BSc, MSc, DIC, PhD, DSc, CGeol, CMarSci

Emeritus Associate

Marine geologist and oceanographer

Biography

Career

Qualifications

Research

Dr. Colin Summerhayes is a marine geologist and oceanographer with expertise in the role of climate in forming marine sediments of different types, especially seabed resources of phosphate and oil and gas, and in interpreting the history of climate from sedimentary records. He was educated at University and Imperial Colleges, London, at Oxford, and at Victoria University, Wellington, NZ, then worked at the New Zealand Oceanographic Institute, at Imperial College, London, at the University of Cape Town and at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Applying his skills beyond the academic world, he spent 12 years as a researcher in the oil and gas business, working first for Exxon and then for BP on new techniques for analysing basins and prospecting for oil rich source rocks, covering most of the world's oil and gas basins from northern Norway to the Falklands Plateau. Moving into management, from 1986-88 he was a Branch Manager in the Exploration Division of the BP Research Centre, Sunbury-on-Thames, and responsible for specialist research staff in Aberdeen, Houston, Holland and the UK. From 1988-95 he was one of the UK's leading oceanographers as Director of the Natural Environment Research Council's Institute of Oceanographic Sciences Deacon Laboratory, in Wormley, in Surrey, where he was responsible for managing some of the UK's major research programmes on the role of the oceans in climate change. Having steered the institute through a major restructuring, he then moved it to become the core of the new Southampton Oceanography Centre, of which he became Deputy Director.

Leaving the UK once more, from 1997-2004 he served UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, in Paris, as Director of the Global Ocean Observing System (or GOOS). The GOOS was set up to provide the ocean component of the UN's Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), which detects changes and trends in global climate and provides advice to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Dr Summerhayes was a member of the Steering Committee of the GCOS.

From 2004 - 2010 he was Executive Director of the International Council for Science's Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), which is based at the Scott Polar Research Institute of Cambridge University, where he is now an Emeritus Associate (from April 1, 2010). There he has coauthored two recent scientific papers reviewing Antarctic climate and its role in the global climate system, and is co-editor of the recent book "Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment" (2009). He is also co-author of "Oceans 2020: Science, Trends and the Challenge of Sustainability", and of "Oceanography: an Illustrated Guide". During his time with SCAR Dr Summerhayes provided annual reports on climate change to the annual meetings of the governmental Parties to the Antarctic Treaty. His primary current scientific interest is climate change and its relation to energy. He also represented SCAR on the organising committee for the 4th International Polar Year 2007 -2008, organising its first conference, jointly with the International Arctic Science Committee, in St Petersburg, Russia, in July 2008, and assisting with the organisation of the two follow up IPY conferences in Oslo in 2010 and in Montreal in 2012.

In retirement as an Emeritus Associate he continues his research, having focused first on writing a history of the 3rd German Antarctic Expedition, with Cornelia Luedecke (published July 2012). He is currently working on a geological history of climate change, which will expand the Geological Society of London's Statement on Climate Change, of which he was the lead author in 2010. He is providing advice to the Korea Polar Research Institute (KOPRI), lecturing on climate change on Antarctic cruise ships (December 2010 and 2012), and working in a voluntary capacity for professional societies (Geological Society of London, Society for Underwater Technology, and Institute for Marine Science and Technology).

Publications

Selected publications

Teaching

External activities