Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS
Content archived on 2024-05-27

UNraveling PAst Climate as a Key to understanding future CLIMATE

Objective

Climate change is of growing public concern, and an important political priority of the European Union. In order to combat future climate change, it is vital to gain an improved understanding of natural variability, thresholds, and mechanisms in the integrated climate system. Such knowledge requires studying the geological record of the past. For my research I measure small atomic abundance variations of radiogenic isotopes to decipher past changes in ocean circulation patterns and ice sheet evolution on million-year to millennial time scales. The project UNPACK CLIMATE (UNraveling PAst Climate as a Key to understanding future CLIMATE) will address two fundamental questions in the integrated climate system. What is the role of the ocean during past rapid climate change events? The deep ocean stores and transports vast amounts of heat and carbon, and changes in its circulation are likely to influence global climate. Although there are numerous tracers of water mass position in the past we know very little about the flux of each water mass. This hurdle can be overcome by a new proxy I developed to decipher past ocean ventilation rates, combined neodymium isotopes and radiocarbon measurements from absolutely dated deep-sea corals. How stable was the East Antarctic ice sheet over the past 15 million years? The East Antarctic Ice Sheet contains the largest amount of freshwater on earth, and understanding its past stability and potential mechanisms of destabilization seem to be vital in the context of future global warming. The Pliocene warm period (4.5 – 3.0 Ma) was the last time Earth’s climate was significantly warmer than today. I will apply an innovative technique (provenance analyses of ice-rafted debris) to constrain Miocene to Pliocene (~14 – 1.8 Ma) extend and stability of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

FP7-PEOPLE-IRG-2008
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

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.

MC-IRG - International Re-integration Grants (IRG)

Coordinator

IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE
EU contribution
€ 100 000,00
Address
SOUTH KENSINGTON CAMPUS EXHIBITION ROAD
SW7 2AZ London
United Kingdom

See on map

Region
London Inner London — West Westminster
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

No data
My booklet 0 0