Grain size trends in mountainous streams and the construction of stratigraphies and gravel resources: A source-to-sink perspective.
The Institute of Geological Sciences at the University of Bern invites applications for a fully-funded 3-year PhD project in the framework of the Marie Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN) 'Source-to-Sink Future', which also includes several university and industry partners in Europe.
The PhD student will be expected to measure, from the headwaters down to the valley bottom along selected streams in the European Alps and possibly also in Colombia: channel widths, energy gradients, flow patterns and grain sizes during field campaigns. For selected sites, the PhD student will repeatedly measure these variables several times a year to detect possible temporal variations of these variables. The PhD student will combine these results and estimate patterns of bedload and suspension load in mountainous streams in Europe where nearly all rivers have been corrected, and possibly also in Colombia where streams are still in their natural state. Sediment transport, sediment flux and grain size distributions for natural and anthropogenically corrected streams will be modeled using the Bagnold equation for bedload transport.
More details on the PhD position at the University of Bern, Switzerland: consult this webpage