DR. Paul Butler

About

I entered academia relatively late, leaving a 25-year career as an IT consultant in London in 2001 to complete an undergraduate course in Ocean Science at the School of Ocean Sciences at Bangor University.  Immediately after that, I was presented with a PhD opportunity, also at Bangor, in what was then the relatively new field of sclerochronology, the challenge being to use the somewhat random contents of a bag of bivalve shells collected from around the Isle of Man to create a crossdated chronology for the Irish Sea using specimens of Arctica islandica.  As part of the PhD I constructed what was then the longest (at 487 years) shell-based chronology.

Following the completion of my PhD, I worked on the EU FP6 MILLENNIUM project (European Climate of the Last Millennium), helping to construct a 1,357 year shell-based chronology (this for A. islandica shells from the North Icelandic Shelf). As a recognition of the rapid increase in interest in the field of sclerochronology, our group obtained EU funding for a Marie Sklodowska Curie Initial Training Network, ARAMACC (“Annually resolved archives of marine climate change”), which aimed to integrate all aspects of the use of bivalve sclerochronology as a proxy for the marine environment. From 2013-2017 I acted as co-ordinator of this very successful project.

AWARDS

As a result of work done during my PhD, in 2010 I was awarded the Lewis Penny medal by the Quaternary Research Association for pioneering work on the Quaternary stratigraphy of Britain (admittedly a relatively small proportion of the Quaternary). Subsequently, in 2014 I was received the Lyell Fund from the Geological Society of London for noteworthy published research in the Earth Sciences.