Peter van der Beek awarded ERC Advanced Grant

On March 28th, the European Research Council (ERC) published the list of its Advanced Grants awardees [1] 2019. Among the 222 projects selected (out of 2,052 submitted) — including 31 based in France and 10 in the Earth and Environmental Sciences — is the project COOLER (Climatic Controls on Erosion Rates and Relief of Mountain Belts) proposed by Peter van der Beek, professor at the ISTerre / OSUG.

It has been suggested that slow and continuous global cooling beginning in the Cenozoic era (the last 65 million years) is linked to the growth of mountain ranges (especially the Himalayas) : mountain uplift would increase erosion, and therefore also increase chemical weathering reactions (related to the exhumation of "fresh" rocks) and burial of organic carbon, which would reduce the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by its transfer into the lithosphere.

It has also been suggested that the colder and more variable climate of the Pliocene-Quaternary era (the last 5 million years) would have led to an increase in erosion and relief growth. If both theories prove to be true, this would imply that the Earth’s climate is potentially very unstable (as it would form a positive feedback loop between climate and erosion). This could explain why the Earth occasionally switches to conditions of global glaciation ("Snowball Earth"). However, the second interaction has not been explicitly demonstrated and remains highly controversial.

The COOLER project proposes to study this interaction in more detail by developing innovative tools to record the relief’s erosion and evolution through the use of unparalleled spatial and temporal resolution. The new data will be integrated into numerical models in order to deduce potential driving mechanisms. This will test the links between Quaternary glaciation and the potential increase in global erosion rates. This project proposes in particular to develop a new very high resolution thermochronology method to record the history of erosion and relief evolution over the last few million years, by setting up the first operational 4He/3He thermochronology laboratory in Europe).