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Departmental homepageProfessor McCave is a geological oceanographer. He studied geology at Oxford and Brown University, USA, and then took a postdoctpral position as a marine sedimentologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, studying tides in the North Sea. At Cambridge, he became Woodwardian Professor of Geology at the Department of Earth Sciences, from which post he has now retired.
Professor McCave continues to advise postgraduate students in Earth Sciences.
The present focus of his research is on deep ocean circulation in relation to changing climate, looking at the North Atlantic and Southern Ocean. His aim is to understand how the modern deep ocean circulation shapes the sea bed and controls the distribution of sediment types, grain-sizes and bedforms, and then apply that understanding to interpretation of the geological record of the changing deep-sea circulation in piston and gravity cores for the late Pleistocene, and Ocean Drilling Project cores for the Neogene and earlier Pleistocene. He has invented the 'sortable silt' (10-63 µm) mean size proxy for depositional current speed that allows insight into changes in vigour of deep ocean circulation.
Hollister, C.D. and I.N. McCave, 1984. Sedimentation under deep-sea storms. Nature, 309: 220-225.
McCave, I.N., 1986. Local and global aspects of the bottom nepheloid layer in the world ocean. Netherlands Journal of Sea Research, 20: 167-181.
McCave, I.N., Thornalley, D.J.R., & Hall, I.R., 2017. Relation of sortable silt grain size to deep-sea current speeds: Calibration of the ‘Mud Current Meter’ Deep-Sea Research Part I, 127, 1-12.
McCave, I.N., 2023. One million years of Mediterranean Outflow strength. Quaternary Science Reviews, 317, 108260, 14 pp.
