Progetti di ricerca

By preventing all the Earth’s carbon to be released into the oceans and atmosphere or to be stored within rocks, the geological carbon cycle acts as a global long term thermostat, linking the evolution of climate and life to plate tectonics.… Leggi tutto The uncertainty regarding CO2 emissions from continental magmatic arcs, a primary natural input of carbon into the ocean and atmosphere, is currently the greatest limitation to our quantitative understanding of the geological carbon cycle. The high-gain target of MATRICs is to reconstruct the time history of magmatic CO2 emissions from the Neo-Tethyan convergent plate margin and its critical contribution to early Cenozoic climate changes. This ambitious goal will be achieved by iterative geologic data acquisition and state-of-the-art numerical modeling. I propose to couple three established techniques to assess temporal changes in the source and amount of CO2 emissions from the NeoTethyan magmatic arc and assess their effects on early Cenozoic climate: (1) studies of melt inclusions, pockets of melts preserved within magmatic rocks, (2) analyses of trace elements concentrations (e.g., Hg, Te) within the sedimentary record, and (3) numerical petrothermo-mechanical geodynamic and climate carbon cycle modeling. Undertaking this multi-disciplinary and ground-breaking project is now possible, owing to my success in using numerical modeling and diverse geological data to unravel the interactions between tectonics and climate accounting for magmatism. Engaging in a high-gain win-win challenge, MATRICs will either overturn or finally validate untested paradigms about the tectonic forcing of Cenozoic climate. In either case, the knowledge produced about the geological carbon cycle will allow us to better assess the drivers of natural climate variability and, by comparison, the climatic consequences of current anthropic emissions