The ACE project is one of around 300 awarded a total of €678million in grants through the ERC’s Consolidator Grants programme. Provided through the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme, the grants aim to support outstanding scientists and scholars to establish independent research teams and develop promising scientific ideas.
For the ACE project, Dr Gales will be working alongside an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), Northern Illinois University (USA), the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (New Zealand), National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (Italy), The Australian National University (Australia) and the Alfred Wegener Institute (Germany).
Over the course of the five-year project, they will use scientific research cruises to deploy and collect a series of underwater monitoring equipment deployed in the canyon for a whole year, as well as using autonomous underwater vehicles, enabling them to observe Antarctic turbidity currents in unprecedented detail.
Sediment traps will also be lowered to the ocean floor so that samples can be taken directly from the currents and later analysed in the lab to show the quantities of organic carbon and other materials they contain.
The researchers hope this new data can be used to drive forward global carbon models and climate mitigation policies by providing the first detailed measures of the processes, in turn enabling improved representation of processes influencing the global carbon cycle.
They also believe the project’s outputs will represent a paradigm shift in quantifying the role of high-latitude turbidity currents in carbon cycling.