Objective
Throughout the last hundred thousand years, Europe has experienced rapid swings in climate. Some of these changes have been of the order of 5-10°C in only a few decades. The cause of these changes lies in the oceanography of the North Atlantic Ocean. The Gulf Stream transports vast amounts of heat from the Tropics and releases it into Europe, maintaining a warm climate. However, this surface current has not always done this. It is now understood that in the past this current has sometimes abruptly swung to a more southerly position off the Iberian Peninsula, robbing northern Europe of heat and moisture. In this project we will explore the effect of these changes on glacier extent in the Spanish Pyrenees. Glaciers are highly sensitive to climate change, particularly to temperature. We will use the cutting edge technique of exposure dating using cosmogenic nuclides to determine the position of glaciers in the past. We will then reconstruct the position of the glaciers through time to determine the response to climate change on this system. To implement this project we will use existing infrastructure at the University of Exeter to introduce a capability to prepare samples for Cl-36 dating. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity today. The findings from this project will help us understand the future effects of global warming so that we are better prepared for the environmental and economic costs.
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: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesoceanography
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
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Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2010-RG
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
MC-IRG - International Re-integration Grants (IRG)Coordinator
EX4 4QJ Exeter
United Kingdom