Simone Moretti, a researcher who will join the CNR-ISP from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, has been awarded a five-year European Research Council (ERC) grant for the SORBETTO project.

The goal: to understand how ocean warming and deoxygenation are changing Antarctic ecosystems by combining historical and modern biological collections, spanning a century of polar exploration, with innovative geochemical and morpho-densitometric techniques based on a mobile X-ray microtomography laboratory. “Historical collections offer us a unique window into how these organisms have already responded to environmental changes,” Moretti explains. “That is where we can start to build reliable models of their future.”

An important achievement for Italian polar research and a step forward in understanding and protecting one of the planet’s most vulnerable ecosystems. - Press release