Brussels, 15/07/2005 (Agence Europe) - CRONUS-EU, a research project financed by the European Union, is to try to lay down on a better chronology of the events which marked the history of the Earth's surface. The use of cosmic rays will allow scientists to date changes which occurred in the landscape more precisely. The new methods based on cosmic rays will shed new light on the climatic cycles and conditions of the past, changes in soil erosion, the frequency of floods and landslides and on how changes to rocks influences the heating and cooling of the planet.
Nine European teams of scientists will work in close cooperation with a parallel initiative involving 13 universities from the United States, financed by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The scientists will take samples of rocks from sites of particular interest throughout the world, and expose the elements to nuclear rays in high-energy accelerators, and will count the impacts of cosmic rays using detectors set on aeroplanes flying at high altitude. The result will be collated and analysed in order to understand the fundamental parameters of these reactions to the cosmic rays, and to allow them to be used as a tool to reconstitute and analyse changes in the environment.
Supernovae, which explode at great distances from the Galaxy, send out torrents of atomic particles, which contain an enormous amount of energy. Billions of these cosmic rays reach the Earth each year. Thanks to CRONUS (Cosmic-Ray prOduced NUclide Systematics), geologists can measure the cumulative results of these nuclear transmutations in the rocks on the Earth's surface. With the CRONUS-EU and CRONUS-US projects, which are two independent initiatives cooperating on a voluntary basis, the researchers from the EU and from the National Science Foundation of the United States will use these measurements as a "clock", to establish the chronology of the evolution of the Earth's surface. CRONUS-EU will train the high-level scientific community needed to develop and apply these techniques, which will be of benefit to many different scientific disciplines in Europe. The training of junior and senior researchers to use these new techniques is an integral part of the European action CRONUS-EU.
The European Union has given the CRONUS-the EU project a budget of 3.4 million EUR (4.4 million American dollars) over four years. CRONUS-US has a budget of 5.8 million dollars (4.8 million EUR) over five years.