Etudes Non Stop Study Non Stop
Related Articles
Host institution
The UB is member of the League of European Research Universities (LERU) and its training offer encompasses all the main branches of knowledge, such as the humanities, health sciences, social sciences, experimental sciences and engineering. The Faculty of Earth Sciences at the UB, with more than hundred researchers and teaching staff, offers bachelor’s degrees in Geology, Geological and Environmental Engineering, and Marine Sciences, and master’s degrees in Reservoir Geology and Geophysics, Mineral Resources and Geological Hazards, Water Science and Management, and Paleobiology and Fossil Record. Doctorate Programmes include Earth and Marine Sciences.
Miguel Garcés is member of the Geodynamics and Basin Analysis Group and the Geomodels Research Institute, aiming at developing and spreading new concepts, tools, and workflows to improve the understanding of geological systems. Main research topics of Geomodels include 3D-4D reconstruction of geological structures, numerical and analogue modelling of sedimentary and deformation processes, paleomagnetism, geophysical data acquisition and analysis, dynamics and evolution of landslides.
Miguel Garcés has raised competitive R+D Projects since 2005, and was co-promotor of the ESF Earthtime-EU (08-RNP-017). Research activities mainly focused in: 1) Understanding of the climatic vs tectonic forcing mechanism of sedimentary sequences, 2) Cyclostratigraphic analysis; 3) Propagation of climate signal across sedimentary systems, and 4) the paleogeographic evolution of the peri-Tethyan region.
ESR#4 Research objectives
Foreland systems are regions where complex interactions and feedbacks occur between tectonic growth, subsidence and the surface processes of erosion, sediment transport and sedimentation. Sediment fluxes across foreland systems may undergo multiple shifts driven primarily by the cratonwards propagation of the orogenic wedge, and externally driven base-level changes. These factors impact on the dispersal of sediments towards the peripheral oceanic basins, and the temporary development of sills and sinks. We aim to reconstruct the evolving paleogeography and the sediment transfer systems of the Central and Eastern south-Pyrenean foreland in response to the tectonic emplacement of the South-Pyrenean Central Units. We aim to address the timing of basin partitioning, evolution of sills and sinks, and resulting rearrangement of sediment fluxes and its impact in the stratigraphic architecture. Key magnetostratigraphic sections will be constructed in the Ripoll, Ager and Graus-Tremp Basins to refine the absolute age of sedimentary sequences. The results from magnetostratigraphy will be integrated with paleocurrent data from the studied sections and with earlier sediment provenance studies based on petrological analyses and detrital zircon geochronometry.
The proposed study will help (1) Constraining further the paleogeographic scenario of a debated stage of the evolution of the South-Pyrenean Foreland; (2) Establishing a high resolution magnetostratigraphy-based chronostratigraphic frame of the Paleocene to Middle Eocene of the Eastern and Central Pyrenees regions; (3) Analysis of sediment provenance from published and newly acquired data; (4) Construction of Paleogeographic maps of the Paleocene to Middle Eocene (1 week short visit to UNIGE); (5) Testing results with numerical modelling, constraining rates of uplift, erosion and sedimentation.
Presentation of the research project (cooperative aspect)
This PhD position is within the framework of a European ITN project named S2S-FUTURE: SIGNAL PROPAGATION IN SOURCE TO SINK for the FUTUre of earth Resources and Energies involving 15 PhD positions.
Under the supervision of Miguel Garcés (University of Barcelona, Geodynamics and Basin Analysis Group), the PhD student will develop further the magnetostratigraphy-based chronostratigraphic frame of the Paleocene to Middle Eocene sedimentary record of the Eastern and Central Pyrenees. Existing and newly collected paleocurrent and provenance data will be integrated in the stratigraphic framework to produce refined paleogeographic maps of the early stages of building of the Pyrenean orogen and basin partitioning. Results will be tested with numerical modelling, constraining rates of uplift, erosion and sedimentation.
The project involves field work in the Pyrenees and research stays (secondment) at Université de Geneve, Switzerland (1 week), Université de Rennes 1, France, (1 month ), and TOTAL (1 month) for integration of databases. A longer research stay at GFZ Potsdam, Germany (Prof. Braun, 4 months) is planned for modeling landscape evolution during phases of basin partitioning.
The PhD student will be involved in scientific meetings and in research activities conducted in other laboratories/companies from Europe and associated countries. An important component of the training will be the participation to 3 main major “Summer Institutes”:
Summer 2020: “Dragonstone” – South-Pyrenees Spain and France: an innovative combination of field excursion and computer modeling of surface processes from source to sink.
Summer 2021: “The Factory” – Norway, Great Britain and Switzerland: field visit of modern S2S systems and course intensive program program of technical and soft skills to accelerate the students’ research, write and present their results, consolidate their profiles and develop concrete plans for their future.
Summer 2022: “Inside Africa” – South-Africa: an immersion of ESRs in the modern source-to-sink system of a continental-scale large river, the Orange in Southern Africa, with high economic implications for mining industries.
In addition to these major milestones of the program, the PhD students will 1) continuously develop their core research skills via their own research project locally and within the network while at secondments and conferences, 2) receive a mandatory amount of hard and soft-skills training specific to their own doctoral school, along with mentoring by joint supervising bodies, 3) use EGU conferences both as dissemination events for ESRs results and network events for progress reports and evaluations, and 4) collaborate into practical activities aimed at network-structuring legacy deliverables.
The goal of S2S-FUTURE is to understand, quantify and model the sediment routing system from the sediment production (source) to the sediment deposition (sink); its tectonic and climatic controls; and to establish generic rules for a full understanding of signals propagation in S2S systems for building predictive models of sediment location and characteristics. These studies of S2S systems require interdisciplinary approaches combining geomorphology, sedimentology and stratigraphy, geochemistry, tectonic and paleoclimatology coupling observations, quantifications and process modelling. All these skills are integrated in the S2S-FUTURE project.