Dr Piero Bellanova has been appointed to the professorship ‘Coast in the Anthropocene’ at the Institute of Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment (ICBM). He previously taught and conducted research at RWTH Aachen University.
Bellanova studied Earth Sciences at the University of Münster and completed his PhD in Aachen in 2019 on organic-geochemical traces of tsunami deposits. Since then, his research at the interface between land and sea has taken him to Japan, Hawaii, Spain, Portugal, Chile, and Greece.
In order to understand current coastal changes and predict future ones, Bellanova studies post-glacial sediment layers – that is, layers of minute deposits – which serve as a kind of archive for him. In doing so, he combines high-resolution sediment analysis with organic and inorganic geochemistry. In addition, his work focuses on three further areas of research: research into natural hazards like surges or tsunamis and the impacts of climate change, the complex interactions between sediments and their environment, and the spread of sediment-bound pollutants and their consequences for ecosystems.
