Assistant professor in the Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics, Georgina King obtained a ERC Starting Grant for the project "Impact of climate on mountain denudation".
What do we know about the impact of climate on mountain erosion (or “denudation”) on time scales of one to several millennia? Not much, since the debate among geologists has not been resolved to date. The response of the Earth's surface to past and future climate change remains largely unknown.
Prof. Georgina King will tackle this highly controversial geoscience debate thanks to her ERC Starting Grant. Her project will for the first time establish time-series of rock erosion over millennia, linking erosion rate changes to specific climatic changes and processes.
Unlike existing methods, the combination of new techniques will resolve changes in erosion over high-resolution timescales: tens of thousands of years, instead of many hundreds of thousands of years in previous studies. Prof. King will apply this new set of techniques to western Europe, and to Switzerland in particular, shaping the image of the Alps of the future.
ERC Last Calls - Horizon 2020
Informations
Euresearch UNIL
Annne-Emmanuelle.deCrousaz@unil.ch
021 693 47 50