WEaThering in bedrock landSLIDE deposits

Descrizione del progetto

Acquisire informazioni sui trascurati meccanismi relativi al clima terrestre

L’attuazione di modelli meteorologici è la principale metodologia disponibile per aiutarci a comprendere il sistema climatico della Terra. Ciononostante, dobbiamo tuttora sviluppare un kit di strumenti esplicativo per svariati fenomeni. In particolare, sussiste una mancanza di un quadro per l’alterazione chimica meteorica nei depositi di frane rocciose, una fonte di dati significativa che potrebbe facilitare le nostre previsioni sul clima terrestre. Il progetto WetSlide, finanziato dall’UE, intende ridefinire l’impatto esercitato dal sollevamento delle catene montuose sul ciclo del carbonio organico e guidare un cambiamento radicale nella nostra comprensione delle dinamiche di alterazione chimica meteorica in termini globali.

Obiettivo

Understanding Earth’s climate system is a major aim of the H2020 work programme. The chemical weathering of silicate and carbonate minerals is a key component of Earth’s climate system by exchanging large volumes of carbon between atmospheric and geologic reservoirs. Commonly, weathering models focus on the steady production, chemical alteration, and erosion of regolith and soil. However, the majority of fresh, weatherable sediment on Earth’s surface is produced in active mountain ranges where unsteady bedrock landsliding is the dominant erosion process. There, existing weathering models do not apply. The lack of data and models for chemical weathering in bedrock landslide deposits presents a major knowledge gap that limits our predictions of weathering dynamics and, ultimately, our understanding of Earth’s climate system.
The goal of WetSlide is to quantify the impact of landslide erosion on chemical weathering fluxes from mountain ranges with three research objectives: 1) Assess millennial-scale variations of weathering rates in landslide deposits with a unique dataset of landslide-seepage-water chemistry from New Zealand; 2) Quantify erosion timescales of landslide deposits by measuring and compiling deposit volumes of dated landslides; 3) Develop and calibrate a model for weathering in landslides based on data from 1-2. This model will be combined with a regolith weathering model to estimate landscape-scale weathering fluxes. By providing the first quantitative study of weathering in landslide deposits, WetSlide has the potential to re-define the impact of mountain belt uplift on the inorganic carbon cycle and to drive a step-change in the understanding of global chemical weathering dynamics. Moreover, interdisciplinary training by experts at two world-leading research institutions will shape a competitive young researcher with a rare combination of skills who can effectively contribute to EU research excellence in integrative natural sciences.