Project description
The early evolution of our planet’s crust and habitability
Understanding the development and changes in the habitability of our planet, along with planetary crust and climate evolution, is crucial to comprehending habitable conditions. It also enhances our knowledge of how planets evolve and how ultramafic rocks give way to felsic magmas and crusts. The ERC-funded PLANETAFELSIC project will investigate the onset of felsic crust formation around 4.5 to 4 billion years ago using natural zircon-bearing rocks that were derived from ultramafic rocks once making up most of our planet's composition. The project will use state-of-the-art modelling, experiments and field data acquisition to identify rock-forming processes, re-evaluate previous assessments of physical-chemical conditions and develop novel geochemical models.
Objective
A turning point for the whole planetary evolution, climate and habitability was the onset of felsic (i.e. enriched in Si and Al) crust formation 4.5 4.0 Gyr ago. To date, this onset can be traced using natural zircon mineral (ZrSiO4)-bearing rocks, as well as laboratory experiment and modelling. My project is based on cutting-edge experiments and modelling as well as field data acquisition on natural rock samples to construct a first comprehensive fundamental model of the primordial felsic crust formation and evolution on Earth, and very likely, Mars and Venus. My recently established laboratory experimental protocols and modelling approaches open a new window to understanding of how the zircon-bearing felsic magmas, rocks and crust can be produced from the ultra-mafic rocks (Mg, Fe-rich, and Si, Al-poor) that dominated early planets composition.
PLANETAFELSIC has four research objectives: (i) to identify and explore the rock-forming processes that controlled the formation and evolution of the primordial felsic crusts on Earth, Mars and Venus; (ii) re-evaluate what physical-chemical conditions are reflected by the trace element and isotope signatures of zircon formed and evolved in the presence of magmas and fluids; (iii) to constrain the initial steps of planetary geodynamics (i.e. rock-forming reactions, transformations and movements) and how they are recorded in the trace element and isotope signatures in mantle-derived rocks; (iv) to construct a geochemical model of the habitable conditions during the early evolution of the rocky planetary surface.
With PLANETAFELSIC grant, I will build a team dedicated to addressing these challenging goals in a comprehensive way. Ambitious, but feasible and timely, PLANETAFELSIC will significantly advance our understanding of how the habitable conditions could be formed on the planetary surface. This will pave the route for future missions to Mars and Venus and exoplanet exploration.
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.
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
75794 Paris
France