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Description
The project has three main objectives focused on three temporal scales addressing climate landforms dynamics variability in the past (the Holocene), present/recent time (multi-decadal scale) and future (21st century). They are grouped on the frame of four work packages, i. e. project management (1), mountain research (2), deltaic/fluvial research (3) and comparison of the sensitivity of the two environments (4). The mountain research WP aims at documenting the deglaciation chronology, glacial/periglacial transition and past rock slopes and landslide activity, characterizing recent climate trends and geomorphological dynamics and modeling permafrost distribution and hazard susceptibility. This research comes as a follow up of a former project (MedAlp) that investigated preliminary permafrost and periglacial processes, glacial lakes sediments and past climate changes in the Carpathians. The deltaic research WP aims at deciphering in detail Danube delta system evolution, assessing its responses to sea-level rise, climate variability and anthropic pressure and also at finding solutions for mitigating the increasing risk of delta plain sinking and coastal flooding and erosion hazards. State of the art methods in coring, sedimentological analysis, datings, subsidence rates assessment and computer modeling will be implemented. Several former national projects on past and present Danube delta morphodynamics, climate change impact and geoarchaeology set the stage for the current approach. The mountain-delta comparison WP assures the synergy of the project and proposes an interdisciplinary and integrative approach of sediment fluxes, landforms dynamics, their climate change sensitivity and hazards and risk assessment and mitigation measures from the two opposed but strongly connected environments via sediment transfer. This WP also prepares and introduces future work that could be related to source-to-sink model development in the Carpathian-Danube-Black Sea region.