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Emma Gatti, BSc (Hons), MPhil

PhD student

Tephrostratigraphy and paleo-environmental impact of the super-eruption of Mt. Toba, 73k years ago.

Biography

I was born in Milan, Italy, and moved to England for the first time in 2003 for an Erasmus Project at Brunel University, West London. I obtained my Bachelor degree in Geology at the University of Milano Bicocca in 2006, with a thesis on geochronology (U-Th analysis of a speleothem from South-Brazil and climatic implications). After graduating in October 2006, I participated in field volcanology in Naples and Auvergne, sponsored by the University of Milano Bicocca and the University of Paris 2. Following this experience, I worked as a research student at the M. Carapezza INGV institute on Vulcano Island (Italy) and then moved to Cambridge to study for the MPhil in GIS and Remote Sensing (Department of Geography). I graduated in September 2008 with a research focus on reactive nitrogen chemistry in volcanic plumes probed using UV spectroscopy. I then worked for several months as a GIS specialist for the ERA, in Cambridge, before starting my PhD in January 2009. Parallel to my academic activity I volunteer as a freelance journalist for numerous scientific journals (including Science and BlueSci, the University Science Magazine).

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Research

I am interested in Quaternary palaeo-environmental feedbacks to climatic changes . Anomalous, strong magnitude events (super-eruptions, mega-floods, earthquakes) are believed to have shaped, towards sudden climatic changes, the shape of the Earth as we know it today. I reconstruct the environmental signal as recorded in sediment sequences (lake, fluvial, eolian, volcanic) using multidisciplinary geological and geochemical techniques , from trace elements abundance to clay minerals x-ray diffraction, mass spectrometry, isotopes geochemistry, SEM, petrography and micromorphology.

I am also interested in studying the cause-effect relationship between climate changes and human evolution. Therefore, besides my micros-cale lab activities, I study also macro-scale geomorphology, sedimentology and river hydrology. I resolve these questions using a combination of field work observations, coring, EDM surveys and remote sensing mapping.

My PhD project summarise my interests. Mt. Toba (Indonesia) erupted ~74,000 years ago, producing the largest known eruption of the Quaternary. The effects of this great event have been observed in terrestrial fluvial sites in India and Malaysia, in marine sediment cores between the South China Sea and the Arabian Sea, and further away as much as in the GISP2 ice-core in Greenland. The effects that such a great eruption might have had on the Earth at global scale are at best conjectured, and a satisfactory analytical reconstruction of the dynamics of the explosion and its effect on the global climate and environment is still not available, mainly due to the difficulty to trace the process of the phenomenon without having good constraints on fundamental parameters such as the magnitude, intensity and duration of the eruption. My research aims is to reconstruct the Toba palaeo-environmental signal as recorded in thick tephra layers explored in river terraces of several sites in India and Malaysia. The overall question of my PhD is: "Can we find any evidence, in the terrestrial records, of a strong environmental change directly related to the Toba eruption? And if yes, which type of evidences? And to which extent this might have caused a global cooling?"

The research, sponsored in part by the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, is part of an international project involving archaeologists and geologists from around the world.

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