Studying how volcanic CO2 emissions influenced the climate in Earth's geological past to improve predictions of future climate changes driven by anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is the goal of the MATRICs research project (Magmatic Triggering of Cenozoic Climate Changes), coordinated by Pietro Sternai, a professor of geophysics at the Department of Environmental and Earth Sciences at Milano-Bicocca University. The project has recently been awarded a €2 million ERC Consolidator Grant by the European Union, funding five years of research.
ERC Consolidator Grants are awarded by the European Research Council to researchers with approximately a decade of recognised expertise and a track record of delivering innovative and high-quality projects. Professor Sternai will lead a team of three doctoral students and four research fellows.
The MATRICs project is inspired by a key observation. “We know the climate's evolution during the Cenozoic Era, approximately 60 million years ago to the present day, but we don’t fully understand the drivers behind its changes,” explains Sternai. One focus of the project is to study the cessation of volcanic activity in a magmatic arc south of Asia following the collision of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates.
“The collision between India and Asia, still ongoing and initiated 50–60 million years ago,” continues Sternai, “not only led to the formation of the Himalayas and Tibet, with long-term effects on global climate, but also extinguished a magmatic arc stretching over 5,000 kilometres, comparable to today’s Andes arc. The question is: how does the climate respond when CO2 emissions from such a volcanic arc cease? Does it cool? Does it warm? We aim to understand how these magmatic changes influenced global climate evolution during the early Cenozoic.”
The research involves petrographic and geochemical analyses of rock samples from three collision zone sites currently under geological study: Iran, Ladakh (northwest India), and Tibet.
“We will sample magmatic rocks and measure their CO2 content,” Sternai explains. “We’ll also collect sedimentary rocks to analyse mercury and tellurium levels, which provide indirect information about magmatic activity in those areas. The measurements will then be interpreted using numerical models to estimate how changes in CO2 emissions from volcanic activity impacted the global carbon cycle and climate.”
The project’s ultimate goal is to use insights from the geological past to inform our understanding of the future. “Once we establish a correlation between volcanic CO2 emissions and long-term climate variations, we can compare those findings to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions and the resulting climate changes occurring now and in the future. This knowledge of the geological carbon cycle will help us better evaluate the drivers of natural climate variability and, by comparison, the impact of human-induced emissions,” Sternai concludes.
Since 2014, Milano-Bicocca University has secured funding for 19 ERC projects, including eight Consolidator Grants, two Advanced Grants, five Starting Grants, two Proof of Concept Grants, and two Synergy Grants.
“Understanding the mechanisms behind climate change is of increasing importance and calls for ever more sophisticated methodologies,” says Guido Cavaletti, Vice Rector for Research at Milano-Bicocca. “The approach proposed by this project is highly innovative, perfectly in line with the ethos of an institution like Milano-Bicocca.”
Photos of Pietro Sternai and details of the research are available at this link.
About Pietro Sternai
Born in Milan in 1984, Pietro Sternai is a geologist and associate professor of geophysics at the Department of Environmental and Earth Sciences at Milano-Bicocca University. He trained at the University of Milan and obtained his doctorate at ETH Zurich. Returning to Italy under the Rita Levi Montalcini Young Researchers Programme, he has been conducting research at Milano-Bicocca since 2019. Sternai combines numerical modelling and quantitative analysis to interpret geological data and explore interactions between tectonics and climate.
He leads the international CoSy (Coupled Earth Systems) research group and has won numerous awards, including the Young Talents Award from Milano-Bicocca (2019–2021) and the Flinn-Hart Award from the International Lithosphere Program (2022). Sternai is a member of the Young Academy of Europe and holds an Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Research Fellowship.