While membership to the EU is growing, what many may not know is that Europe is in a constant state of flux. As you read this, the Mediterranean basin is shrinking, the Alps are rising and pushing northwards, and Scandinavia is still rebounding after having been crushed by the weight of a thick and huge ice sheet in the ice ages. And the European project TOPO-EUROPE is there to bear witness.
Topography has a huge impact on society, not only as a result of slow landscape changes but also in terms of how it impacts on geo-hazards and the environment. At the moment, the very topographical shape of Europe is changing. This poses many questions for researchers, such as how these changes will impact the future of Europe, among others.
TOPO-EUROPE aims to not only answer this question but many more as well. Indeed the science involved in TOPO-EUROPE covers a wide spectrum of topics: including among others, Earth crust and mantle dynamics, source-to-sink relationships and sediment dynamics, plateau formation and plate-reorganisation.
TOPO-EUROPE (4-D Topography Evolution in Europe: Uplift, Subsidence and Sea level Change) is part of the European Collaborative Research Scheme known as EUROCORES. This is a unique framework offered by the European Science Foundation (ESF) to promote collaborative research, networking and dissemination while targeting broad and complex topics of research across all scientific domains at the European level and in a global context.
EUROCORES is not part of FP7, although the current funding for coordination and networking is provided under the EU's Sixth Framework Programme for Research. The research funding, which totals some EUR 15 million, comes from national funding organisations though research is driven by the researchers themselves and not by nations.
TOPO-EUROPE kicked off in El Escorial near Madrid in October 2008 during the fourth TOPO-EUROPE International Workshop. Originally the network was an offshoot of the International Lithosphere Programme (ILP) and was developed as a regional research coordinating committee for Europe.
'EUROCORES TOPO-EUROPE provides an important stimulus for realising the ambitions of the TOPO-EUROPE initiative at large,' said Professor Sierd Cloetingh of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, President of the ILP and initiator of both the network and the programme. 'The idea is to bring different segments of the European community together from the fields of deep Earth and surface processes and for exactly that EUROCORES is a good instrument,' he continued.
TOPO-EUROPE is also the natural successor of EuroMARGINS, a completed EUROCORES programme on continental margins.
TOPO-EUROPE involves researchers from a number of disciplines, pooling not only solid Earth experts but also combining them with climate scientists. One of the programme’s Collaborative Research Projects called TOPO-ALPS, for example, attempts to unravel the topographic history of the Alps and its tectonic and climatic drivers.
'One of the foci in the current TOPO-EUROPE is to find ways to bring climate in, to determine what role this plays in tectonic and geomorphic problems. This is a frontier of science, so I expect to see more and more of this type of project in the future,' explained Professor Sean Willet, the project leader of TOPO-ALPS and a geologist at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
Just as importantly, TOPO-EUROPE creates new research opportunities. In particular it is opening up to 60 positions for young researchers. 'If you don’t offer opportunities, young people will not go into our field as they will have the impression that everything has been solved, that the field is classical,' explained Professor Cloetingh.
Shedding light on a changing Europe
