Project description
Checking Earth’s magnetic mystery
For nearly a century, the timing of the inception of Earth’s inner core has fuelled scientific debate, influencing the perceived longevity of our magnetic shield crucial for sustaining life. Recent challenges to the established timeline add complexity to this enigma, necessitating a closer examination. In this context, the ERC-funded UBEICH project aims to revolutionise our understanding of Earth’s inner core evolution. Using an innovative multispecimen–single crystal palaeointensity approach, UBEICH seeks to extract elusive magnetic signals, offering unprecedented insights into deep Earth history and potentially unlocking the secrets of habitability across the cosmos. With far-reaching implications for Earth and beyond, UBEICH’s findings may contribute to solving the mysteries of habitability on exoplanets, particularly super-Earths.
Objective
The existence of Earth's inner core was a major discovery almost a century ago, and since then the timing of its nucleation remains highly debated. This major event in the Earths history enhanced the energy necessary to maintain the magnetic field to the present-day, making our planet habitable. Earth has thus escaped the fate of planets like Mars that lost its protective shield. While the community agreed to place the inner core formation at ~600 million years ago in the Ediacaran Period, new evidence of a change in the Earths magnetic field regime during the Mid-Paleozoic (416332 Ma) challenge this hypothesis: Can we better constrain the Earth inner core history? UBEICH will tackle this issue with a new kind of experimental data describing the long-term evolution of the Earths dynamo strength. In paleomagnetism, the conventional approaches fail to retrieve ancient magnetic signal from old rocks due to their weathering along their complex geological history. To this end, I will develop a promising but challenging multispecimen-single crystal paleointensity. This pioneering approach can significantly increase the number of observations by extracting the magnetic signal from the protected nanometric magnetic inclusion in silicate crystals with the multispecimen technique developed for other purposes. By providing challenging-to-obtain but theoretically reliable data, UBEICH has the ambition to bring a new light on the deep Earth history between 1.1 and 0.3 billion years by unravelling the inner core nucleation. Far-reaching implications beyond the Earths evolution and the origin of the magnetic field are expected, with new clues about the planetary core evolution of all rocky planets to understand the relationships between thermal evolution, dynamo, and planet habitability. This is of paramount importance at a time where amateur astronomers and scientists are discovering many new exoplanets, and especially super-Earth located in the Habitable Zone of their star.
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.
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.
- humanities history and archaeology history
- natural sciences physical sciences astronomy planetary sciences planets exoplanetology
You need to log in or register to use this function
We are sorry... an unexpected error occurred during execution.
You need to be authenticated. Your session might have expired.
Thank you for your feedback. You will soon receive an email to confirm the submission. If you have selected to be notified about the reporting status, you will also be contacted when the reporting status will change.
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
-
HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
See all projects funded under this programme
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.
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.
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.
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.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
See all projects funded under this funding scheme
Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-STG
See all projects funded under this callHost institution
Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
34090 Montpellier
France
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.