Project description
Decoding the Earth’s secrets
The Earth’s geological carbon cycle acts as a long-term thermostat, controlling climate and life’s evolution through plate tectonics. However, a major knowledge gap remains: the uncertainty of CO2 emissions from continental magmatic arcs, which are a key natural source of carbon in the atmosphere and oceans. In this context, the ERC-funded MATRICs project aims to fill this gap by reconstructing the history of magmatic CO2 emissions from the Neo-Tethyan convergent plate margin. Using melt inclusions, trace element analyses, and advanced numerical modelling, MATRICs will shed light on the role of these emissions in early Cenozoic climate shifts. This research will enhance our understanding of natural climate drivers, offering valuable insights for comparing them with today’s anthropogenic emissions.
Objective
By preventing all the Earth’s carbon to be released into the oceans and atmosphere or to be stored within rocks, the geological carbon cycle acts as a global long term thermostat, linking the evolution of climate and life to plate tectonics. The uncertainty regarding CO2 emissions from continental magmatic arcs, a primary natural input of carbon into the ocean and atmosphere, is currently the greatest limitation to our quantitative understanding of the geological carbon cycle. The high-gain target of MATRICs is to reconstruct the time history of magmatic CO2 emissions from the Neo-Tethyan convergent plate margin and its critical contribution to early Cenozoic climate changes. This ambitious goal will be achieved by iterative geologic data acquisition and state-of-the-art numerical modeling.
I propose to couple three established techniques to assess temporal changes in the source and amount of CO2 emissions from the Neo-Tethyan magmatic arc and assess their effects on early Cenozoic climate: (1) studies of melt inclusions, pockets of melts preserved within magmatic rocks, (2) analyses of trace elements concentrations (e.g. Hg, Te) within the sedimentary record, and (3) numerical petro-thermo-mechanical geodynamic and climate carbon cycle modeling. Undertaking this multi-disciplinary and ground-breaking project is now possible, owing to my success in using numerical modeling and diverse geological data to unravel the interactions between tectonics and climate accounting for magmatism.
Engaging in a high-gain win-win challenge, MATRICs will either overturn or finally validate untested paradigms about the tectonic forcing of Cenozoic climate. In either case, the knowledge produced about the geological carbon cycle will allow us to better assess the drivers of natural climate variability and, by comparison, the climatic consequences of current anthropic emissions.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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20126 Milano
Italy
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