GFZ Researcher Michael Henehan (Section 3.3, Earth Surface Geochemistry) will this year receive a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant worth €2 M for his research on past climates. The ERC grant-funded PETRARCH project ('Pinpointing Earth System ThResholds for Anoxia with new Reconstructions of the Cretaceous Hothouse') will start in February 2023 and run for five years. Its focus: a new threat to our Earth system, namely the rapid decline of oxygen concentration in the Earth's oceans.

Starting in February 2023, the project has a duration of 5 years, and will address an emerging threat to our Earth system, namely rapidly dropping oxygen concentrations in the planet’s oceans. In the last 50 years, the area of our oceans bathed in oxygen levels that are too low for much marine life (so-called ‘oxygen minimum zones’) has increased by an area equivalent to the entire EU, due to a combination of warming, fertilizer run-off, and disruption to marine ecosystems. With continuing human activities this is only likely to get worse, and there is a concern that complex feedbacks in the ocean may create so-called ‘tipping points’ beyond which oxygen stress becomes rapidly much more extreme. To figure out what specific trigger mechanisms are most important in setting these tipping points, Henehan’s project at the GFZ will use state-of-the-art geochemical methods to study several intervals in the Cretaceous period (66 -145 Million years ago) when the Earth’s oceans last tipped into extreme, global oxygen limitation. By looking at the chemistry of ancient microfossils in mud drilled from deep below the ocean floor, and combining his results with simulations from Earth system models, Henehan and his new team will work out the exact combination of factors that are needed to cause a global crash in the oceans’ oxygen content.

“The Cretaceous Period has so much left to teach us, in terms of how our world works. It spans these extreme periods of oxygen stress, and some of the warmest global temperatures of the past 250 million years. Yet the type of geochemical approaches we’ll take in this project – and the kinds of exciting insights you can get from them – haven’t yet been pushed back this far in the past, so we’re really going to be pushing the frontiers in that sense,” says Henehan.

Geochemist Michael Henehan has worked within the Earth Surface Geochemistry section at GFZ since 2017. Having grown up in Ireland, he studied at the Universities of Bristol and Southampton in the UK, where he also gained his PhD. After that, he spent 3.5 years as PostDoc in the US at Yale University prior to taking up his current position at GFZ.

His ERC-sponsored project PETRARCH (‘Pinpointing Earth System ThResholds for Anoxia with new Reconstructions of the Cretaceous Hothouse’) takes its name from the Italian scholar and poet Petrarch (1304-1374), whose work exploring and curating ancient archives from Rome and Greece kicked off a Renaissance in the arts and sciences. Like its namesake, this project will look to previously overlooked ancient records – in this case from deep-sea drill cores – to help understand the world around us today.

About the ERC (by ERC)

The ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe. The ERC offers four core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants and Synergy Grants. The Consolidator Grants support excellent, promising researchers in the period from seven to twelve years after their doctorate whose research group is in the consolidation phase.

Since 1 November 2021, Maria Leptin is the President of the ERC. The overall ERC budget from 2021 to 2027 is more than €16 billion, as part of the Horizon Europe programme, under the responsibility of the European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, Mariya Gabriel.
 

Scientific contact:
Dr. Michael Henehan
Section 3.3 “Earth Surface Geochemistry”
Helmholtz Centre Potsdam
GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences
Telegrafenberg
14473 Potsdam
Tel.: +49 331 288-28600
E-Mail: michael.henehan@gfz-potsdam.de