Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : DEVENDRA (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Université libre de Berlin — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1777302.5 €

The chemical weathering of rocks on the Earth’s surface draws down atmospheric CO2, balancing emissions from volcanoes and maintaining habitable temperatures. Basalt and carbonate rocks are particularly crucial in this balance, because they are efficiently weathered: as estimated from studies of the dissolved elements in rivers, basalt accounts for 20-35% of modern global silicate weathering and CO2 consumption flux, despite only covering 5% of Earth’s surface. To formulate sensitivities and feedbacks between weathering of these rocks and climate, we need an accurate description of the exact processes that drive the conversion of rock to soil by weathering. Besides water flow, erosion rate and vegetation are thought to exercise significant control. Currently, however, we lack the tools needed to decipher these controls, because the preferred approach used to quantify erosion and weathering rates – cosmogenic nuclides, produced in situ in quartz – does not work in basalt and carbonate lithologies. The aim of DEVENDRA, dedicated to the pioneer of cosmogenic nuclide geochemistry Devendra Lal (1920 – 2012), is to eliminate this blind spot using a novel method never applied to basalt and carbonate lithologies: the ratio of cosmogenic beryllium-10 rained out from the atmosphere to stable beryllium-9 released by weathering. DEVENDRA will develop this system as a novel erosion and weathering rate meter for these rocks, and will use this new method to calibrate – using globally-distributed soil profiles and catchments of differing climate and erosion rate – the laws that govern weathering and CO2 drawdown in these rocks. The outcomes from DEVENDRA will refine the global weathering models that are used to understand Earth’s carbon cycle on geological time scales, to predict the trajectory of anthropogenic CO2 in coming centuries, and to estimate the potential for negative CO2 emissions by artificially-enhanced weathering of basalts.

Mots-clés : weathering,erosion,cosmogenic nuclides,co2,climate feedback,vegetation
Projet ERC : DROP (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Université d'Utrecht — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2425000.0 €

Asia’s mountain ranges are the world’s most important water towers, often referred to as the planet’s Third Pole. Precipitation in these mountains feeds glaciers and snow fields and generates river flow, which sustains millions of people downstream. Precipitation also triggers natural hazards such as floods, landslides and avalanches, which cause enormous human and economic losses. Despite the importance of high-altitude precipitation, we lack a fundamental understanding of the mechanisms that control its distribution and how it changes. We need this to elucidate the water cycle at the Third Pole. DROP will close this knowledge gap by showing how the mountains, feedback from land surfaces and large-scale circulation control the magnitude and spatiotemporal distribution of high-altitude snow and rain. New field observations at extreme altitudes and state-of-the-art atmospheric modelling will provide a comprehensive picture for the entire Third Pole at a wide range of scales.  At the smallest scale, a high-altitude ice core and meteorological observations will provide key insights into past accumulation trends. At the valley scale, I will combine dense observations of precipitation and high-altitude snow accumulation with atmospheric simulations to gain insight into snow and rainfall patterns. At the scale of the entire Third Pole, I will conduct state-of-the-art atmospheric model experiments, combined with in-situ observations in regional transects and remote sensing to understand how the extreme topography, land surface feedback and moisture recycling control snow and rain patterns. DROP will provide a long-awaited scientific step forward in understanding mountain precipitation in a region where this is of vital importance for water security and disaster risk reduction for millions of people.

Mots-clés : mountain meteorology,high mountain asia,precipitation,snow,rain
Projet ERC : NanoMare (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Université d'Utrecht — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 300000.0 €

Nanoplastics (plastic litter fragments <1µm) were only recently discovered in the marine realm. Due to their colloidal nature, nanoplastics may be dispersed throughout the ocean, potentially affecting all marine life. However, their minuscule size has made it virtually impossible to measure their distribution or determine if microbes can degrade nanoplastics, thus influencing their fate in the ocean. Innovative approaches developed by my team have now made this possible for the first time. Using an ultrasensitive mass spectrometry method, our preliminary results revealed substantial concentrations of various nanoplastic types in both surface waters and the deep sea, suggesting that nanoplastics could constitute an important part of the ocean’s plastic budget. Simultaneously, results from a novel stable isotope assay uncovered the previously unknown ability of marine microbes to degrade nanoplastics, indicating that microbes play a crucial role in determining the fate of these particles in the ocean. However, marine microbes and the ecosystem services they support could also be negatively impacted by nanoplastics. Building on my team’s innovative approaches, we will conduct in situ experiments across surface and deep sea environments, complemented by investigations under laboratory conditions. Through the NanoMare project, we will be the first to provide fundamentally new insights into nanoplastic degradation kinetics, nanoplastic-degrading microbes (including degradation pathways and genes), impacts of nanoplastics on the ocean’s microbiome, and the global prevalence and distribution of nanoplastics and their degradation products in the sea. The NanoMare project will profoundly enhance our understanding of ocean microbe-nanoplastic interactions and nanoplastic inventories, with substantial implications for marine microbiology and other ocean science disciplines. Beyond the ocean, the results will also be important for the fields of hydrology and atmospheric physics.

Mots-clés : nanoplastic,plastic degradation bioremediation,stable isotope labeling,stable isotope probing,pollution
Projet ERC : TAOC (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Université d'Utrecht — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

The Atlantic Ocean Circulation, in particular its zonally averaged component called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), is one of the tipping elements in the climate system. The AMOC is sensitive to freshwater perturbations and may undergo a transition to a climate disrupting state within a few decades under continuing greenhouse gas emissions. The potential climate impacts of such a collapse are enormous and hence reliable estimates of the probability of its occurrence before the year 2100, central within TAOC, are crucial information for policy makers. There are several important challenges to provide such estimates of transition probabilities, to determine the climate impacts of an AMOC collapse and to predict the occurrence of such an event. We will develop novel computational methodology to determine transition probabilities between equilibrium states in a hierarchy of climate models, which is the computational challenge in TAOC. Application of these techniques will lead to estimates of AMOC transition probabilities versus observable quantities and to transition paths, being the climate dynamics challenge in TAOC. The climate modeling challenge in TAOC is to simulate an AMOC collapse in one of the state-of-the-art climate models under at least one scenario of climate change. Finally, a skillful prediction scheme for future AMOC behavior will be developed, using traditional and novel observable precursors based on transition paths, which is the climate prediction challenge in TAOC. TAOC will advance the field of climate dynamics by providing (i) novel computational techniques to study probabilities of tipping phenomena in a hierarchy of climate models and (ii) novel scientific knowledge on the vulnerability of the AMOC under future climate change.

Mots-clés : ocean circulation,climate tipping,predictability,transition probability
Projet ERC : PromSusCat (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Université d'Utrecht — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3500000.0 €

Our large, non-circular use of fossil fuels is the main cause of rapid climate change and resource depletion. CO2 capture followed by conversion back into fuels would be attractive. The feasibility of this route depends critically on new catalysts that allow quick CO2 hydrogenation to desired products. Most man-made catalysts are supported metal nanoparticles. The influence of the type of metal, particle size and metal-support interaction are increasingly well understood, also due to major contributions from my group. In contrast, the influence of the addition of a few foreign atoms (“promoter”) has so far hardly been investigated for new reactions such as CO2 conversion, while it can have a far larger impact on catalyst activity, selectivity, and stability. My aim is to explore and understand promoters and design new, promoted, catalysts. Several challenges must be overcome, such as measuring the structure under working conditions and unravelling the complex interplay between promoters and other catalyst components. I will combine (1) carbon-based model supports, which allows isolating metal-promoter interaction from other effects, (2) emerging atomic scale characterisation, and (3) high throughput testing under relevant high pressure working conditions. Using these tools, I will address fundamental questions such as: • What is the nature of reducible metal oxide promoters, and their interaction with the active metal, CO2, and reaction intermediates, under working conditions? • How does the structure of alkali promoters explain their influence on the rate of CO2 hydrogenation? • Can we tune the adsorption strength of reaction intermediates, such as adsorbed CO, to obtain product distributions far from equilibrium? A detailed understanding of the electronic and structural interaction between metal nanoparticles and promoters is crucial to rationally design catalysts to selectively, effectively and in a stable manner convert CO2 and H2 into valuable fuels.

Mots-clés : supported catalysts metal nanoparticles co2 conversion carbon supports promoters
Projet ERC : ALMEDA (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : University College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 53815.0 €

Recent years have seen something of a renaissance in African literature, with African novelists becoming global best-sellers and achieving the world’s highest literary accolades. But published novels are restrictively expensive in Africa itself and the novel form is ill-suited to African everyday life, where people are more likely to spend their leisure time engaging with informal, ephemeral and not-for-profit literary and oratory cultural forms, such as spoken-word poetry, street theatre, and a variety of online genres. These informal African literatures are rarely catalogued and therefore exist outside of any structured metadata system. The consequence is that formally published English and French African novels are hyper-visible globally, while the rich literary and oratory cultures of the continent itself are caught in a perpetual state of structural ephemerality. The ALMEDA project addresses this problem in three ways. First, by providing the first history of literary metadata on the African continent, the project will provide a diachronic understanding of how colonial cataloguing systems came to construct the idea of the ‘literary work’ as book-based and thus dismissive of Africa’s oral cultures. Secondly, ALMEDA aims to develop and publish a metadata scheme specifically designed for these informal literary materials. This scheme will be multilingual, which will enable a unique descriptive model that allows African-language genres to inhabit their own categories, rather than having to be forced into European literary ontologies. Thirdly, the project will develop a linked open metadata repository, populated via an interface that allows non-specialist entry of metadata on literary materials. By creating and linking metadata on this body of work, this repository will constitute a major intervention in African literature by making these literatures searchable and their records enduring, thereby opening up entirely new possibilities for scholarship.

Mots-clés : african literature,literary metadata,bibliographic metadata,informal literature
Projet ERC : LivePlatforms (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : University College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Work mediated by digital platforms – where the platform brokers labour relationships between worker and client, consumer, or other end user – has become an increasing feature of the employment landscape across Europe. Consequently, understanding the nature of this work has become an urgent need. The LivePlatforms project will develop and test a method for gathering qualitative data on the wide ecosystem that comprises platform work as a lived experience across a national context and critically appraise the mediating roles of the actors involved in this economy. The over-arching aim of this project is to develop a holistic understanding of platform labour by generating, applying, and evaluating a methodological framework that will enable the interrogation of the forces comprising the experience of this work, including and especially those of the lifeworld. By combining methodological concepts from Social Reproduction Theory, Actor Network Theory, and the Livelihoods Approach, it proposes the Platform Livelihoods Ecosystem Approach (PLEA). This methodology approaches platform work as an ecosystem of interacting actors, systems, and processes that manifest across a broad range of labour forms and which interconnect in the pursuit of a livelihood by workers. The objectives are to develop, test, and evaluate this method; to generate a complex understanding of the actors, systems, and processes that define a national platform economy and how they interact to produce labour outcomes; and to critically assess the mediating agency of these actors. The outcomes will be a rich, critical, empirical understanding of the lived experience of platform work and a tested method for qualitatively evaluating platform work on a national scale and with the necessary scope for holistic understanding. This method will provide the research underpinnings for further projects supporting the development of fair, secure, and decent work in this growing sector.

Mots-clés : digital platforms labour studies digital media platform studies
Projet ERC : ANSOC (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : University College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1597276.0 €

This project will create a new vision of Bronze Age ontologies by exploring the role of animals as active participants in Bronze Age social worlds. The impact of contemporary Capitalist ideology on archaeological understanding of the European Bronze Age has been profound. Dominant narratives describe a world in which economic intensification, the accumulation of wealth and the emergence of chiefly hierarchies were predicated on the objectification of the ‘other’. This project will critically re-evaluate models that view animals as objects of exploitation. Drawing on work in animal studies that highlights how living with animals involves intimate interaction and interdependency, it will investigate the intertwining of human and animal identities, and will consider how the social and cultural significance of animals affected how they were farmed, managed and consumed. The appearance of field-systems and houses incorporating byres for cattle indicates major changes in animal management in the Bronze Age. Yet, animal iconography and the presence of animal remains in graves and votive deposits suggest that animals had cultural significance. The project will bring together contextual, zooarchaeological, isotope, organic residue and aDNA analysis to investigate human-animal sociality, examining herd management; patterns of human-animal interaction; animal mobility and exchange; the role of animals in feasting and ritual; and their location in cultural taxonomies. By examining the ontological position of animals not as passive objects but as active subjects, this project will radically reframe the theoretical basis on which wider interpretations of the Bronze Age are based, including how political authority, gender relations and economic activities were structured. By illuminating alternate modalities of power and agency, and different ways of living with non-human others, it will also contribute to current debates around issues such as sustainability in the present.

Mots-clés : bronze age,animals,depositional practice,settlement,landscape,zooarchaeology,adna,isotope analysis
Projet ERC : CivilWars (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : University College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499940.0 €

In the first half of the twentieth century, Europe experienced an unparalleled number of civil wars resulting in millions of deaths. Civil war, as much as inter-state war, was a defining feature of the period for many European societies, from Ireland in the west and Russia in the east, to Finland in the north and Spain and Greece in the south. Since the 1990s, a rich and increasingly sophisticated body of literature has emerged on individual incidents of civil war, ranging from military studies to social and cultural analyses. However, remarkably little comparative work has been undertaken on civil wars in this period. Even fewer studies have explored the connections between them – be it transfers of people, ideas, or practices – beyond their ideological tropes. This has resulted in a tacit assumption of exceptionalism, whereby each civil war is assumed to have been unique and self-perpetuating without any serious attempt to explain why that was so. This project challenges exceptionalist approaches to civil war. While it recognises that significant differences in causes, forms, and/or aftermaths existed between individual civil wars, it argues that those civil wars can only be fully understood as a phenomenon within a pan-European context. The project will therefore investigate the origins, courses, and legacies of European civil wars through a fully integrated team of scholars with complementary expertise on the Russian, Finnish, Irish, Spanish and Greek cases. This will enable comparison between these different conflicts, but it will also go beyond the nation-centric tendencies of comparative approaches to arrive at a better understanding of what made the first half of the twentieth century an era of civil wars in Europe.

Mots-clés : history of violence history of armed conflict modern european history
Projet ERC : ACME (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : University College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2496951.0 €

After centuries coalmining is ending in Europe. Few will be sorry to say goodbye to an industry that epitomises the causes and effects of climate change. But while its environmental impact is now starkly and painfully obvious, Architectures of Coal and Modern Europe (ACME) explores another side of coalmining whose legacies and residues remain in various and often unexpectedly progressive forms. It argues that, responding to the unique conditions of coalmining – underground working practices, labour struggles, economic primacy, and social and environmental degradation – architecture emerged as both site and transmitter of an intense and unprecedented level of technological and social innovation where advanced definitions of the social contract were developed and tested. ACME will provide a new synthesis of methodologies including architectural visualisation to reappraise their significance by exploring and establishing the architectures of coal as ecologies: forms, systems, networks and connections that existed both within and across the buildings and landscapes coalmining created. It argues that these ecologies were pivotal to the creation of what needs to be recognised as a coalmining épistémè – the coalscape – a pervasive, interdependent network of beliefs and practices that enfolded geologies, energies, bodies and space to exert a significant influence on the social and spatial foundation of modern Europe, including its welfare state projects and the origins of the European Union. By examining this overlooked and mostly disappeared collective of architectures and landscapes in Belgium, France, France, Poland and the United Kingdom, ACME will not only reveal how it represents a neglected but fundamental contribution to modern Europe but also provide a crucial new piece of intellectual infrastructure with which to rethink the critical intimacies between our energy sources, cultural and social lives and built environment that have contributed to the Anthropocene.

Mots-clés : architecture,space,twentieth century europe,modernity,coal,mining,visualisation,design,welfare state,controversy,media,landscape,heritage,obsolescence,culture,infrastructure,health,energy,modernism,the anthropocene,ecologies