ACCELERATE is a Marie Skłodowska Curie IF-Project that aims to develop a rapid and affordable technique using Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) to retrieve climatic information preserved in the elemental composition of marine mollusc shell carbonates and establish standardised ways of applying this technique to coastal shell-midden deposits around the world.
It combines the disciplines of Laser Spectroscopy, Climatology and Archaeology to advance the reconstruction of climate change, exploitation of coastal resources and human-landscape interactions at an unprecedented scale and resolution.
Anthropogenic shell deposits are found in their thousands across the globe over the last 100,000 years. Locked within the shells are climatic records with a high resolution. This crucial information is currently inaccessible due to expensive and laborious techniques, resulting in small, unrepresentative studies and a lack of comparability between them.
ACCELERATE resolves this by developing LIBS, which allows rapid chemical analyses, increasing the cost efficiency by a factor of 20 and resulting in large analytical datasets. This will lay the foundation for affordable and comprehensive climate studies world-wide, one of the main Horizon 2020 policy priorities to understand and adapt to climate change.
