Michaël Grelaud

I obtained my PhD in Geosciences at the University of Marseille, France, in 2008 on the impacts of the El Niño Southern Oscillation on the distribution of marine calcareous phytoplankton along the north American Pacific margin over the last 30.000 years. In 2009, I started a postdoc in the group of P. Ziveri at the ICTA. Specialized in paleoceanography and paleoclimatology, my research deals now with the impact of human-induced climate change on the coccolithophores, a key planktonic group of marine calcifiers at the base of the food web. The area of study is the Mediterranean Sea and I focus on the last 250 years. This period, starting with the Industrial Revolution, is characterized by an increased release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere in relation to anthropogenic activities. I am in charge of SYRACO, an automatic system of coccoliths recognition, which measures the size and mass of individual coccolith (the inorganic fossil remains of coccolithophores). Along with the distribution of the different species of coccolithophores, the estimation of their morphometric parameters over the last 250 years make it possible to infer the impact of both ocean acidification and warming on this key marine group. In the frame of the European MedSeA project (Mediterranean Sea Acidification in a changing climate) in addition to my research, I was data manager, collecting and archiving the data produced during the project. I am now expanding my work to another anthropogenic stressor threatening the Mediterranean Sea: the accumulation of micro-plastics in the marine environment from the water column to the sediments.