Coordination Funds

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Carsten Münker
• Subject Area: Mineralogy, Petrology and Geochemistry
• Term: from 2015 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 276857794

In the proposal it is lined out: "In this follow up proposal, we apply for funding to co-ordinate the second period of the project "Building a Habitable Earth" from 2018 - 2021, based on a report for the first 2 funding years from 2015 to 2017. Beyond general co-ordination tasks, our special focus will continue to be on efficiently cross-linking established and young researchers and on providing interdisciplinary training opportunities for incoming researches. We will continue to provide rapid access to suitable sample materials and techniques to the community. To achieve these goals, we propose to continue several co-ordination measures that have included annual SPP meetings, initial training workshops, field workshops for co-ordinated sample campaigns and more advanced topical workshops. These measures will be complemented by efficient equal opportunity measures and by public outreach measures, all based on a lively internet platform that is well maintained and updated regularly. During the second phase of SPP 1833 we plan to co-ordinate a common SPP volume that will finally be published towards the end of the funding period. The goals of these measures are to enhance interdisciplinarity, visibility of the SPP in the scientific community and the public, and to improve long term access for the entire German Earth Science community to rare early terrestrial and extraterrestrial sample suites. The scientific background of the project is that it is still an open question how Earth became the only known habitable planet. The three most critical parameters were (i) the compositions and sources of Earth’s building materials (ii) the Earth’s early internal processing into crust, mantle, and core and (iii) the evolution of the ocean-atmosphere system. Until now the planetary and early geological processes that made Earth the only known habitable planet could not be well addressed, as suitable sample materials and sufficient analytical tools were limited for a long time. This picture has dramatically changed since a couple of years, and new avenues for innovative research emerged. These include the increased availability of suitable sample materials as well as the development of novel techniques. Therefore the project largely focuses on Earth Science-based observational approaches to study the early geological and extraterrestrial sample record. Only such materials provide a vestige of Earth’s early evolution. Analogue studies or entirely theoretical studies are outside the scope of the Project. The project is the first coordinated Earth Science based research program in Germany that addresses the causes for Earth’s habitability from different angles, focusing on key disciplines such as geology, geochemistry, cosmochemistry, petrology, planetology, and geobiology that can be linked to numerical modelling."

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1833: Building a Habitable Earth