From Coral Reef to Continental Shelf Seabed Research

In this episode, I am joined by Tara Williams, a third-year PhD researcher based at the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus and part of the Convex Seascape Survey, a five-year international project investigating how much carbon is stored on the continental shelf seabed, how vulnerable it is to disturbance, and what that means for climate-informed marine management and protection.Tara’s PhD combines modern and historical sediment coring, geochemical analyses, habitat mapping, and archival research to explore how seabed carbon and biodiversity are distributed, how they have changed over time, and how human activities such as trawling or development may place this hidden carbon at risk. Her work reframes the muddy seafloor, often overlooked and misunderstood, as a dynamic, complex ecosystem that plays a critical role in climate regulation and conservation decision-making.