The HotCores project was selected for funding!

25 October 2022.

Big news! The HotCores project was selected for funding for the 2021 ERC Advanced Grant call! ERC Advanced Grants are designed to support excellent scientists and scholars in any field at the career stage when they are already established research leaders, with a recognized track record of research achievements. The HotCores project is lead by Sébastien Merkel at the Université de Lille and will aim at revealing the unknown planet within the Earth: the Earth's inner core.

The project received funding for 2.5 M€ under grant agreement 101054994 from the European Research Council. It will start on 1 December 2022, and is set for a duration of 5 years.

The project aims at performing advanced high pressure and/or high temperature experiments on iron alloys and analogues to reenact key events of the history of the Earth's inner core in the laboratory:

  • as Fe crystallizes at the inner-outer-core boundary,
  • as the IC grows and dynamically evolves to its present state,
  • and as we see it today through the lenses of geophysical exploration.

Project PI is Sébastien Merkel from the Université de Lille, in France, with support from Nadège Hilairet and Julien Chantel. All three are members of the Earth and Planetary Materials research group within the Unité Matériaux et Transformations laboratory at the Université de Lille.

Stay tuned for more news and information!