Anne Nédélec holds an Agrégation in Natural Sciences and is an Earth Sciences professor at the University of Toulouse. She is an international specialist in ancient rocks and past climates and has carried out a number of field missions in Africa and Brazil.

Why did life begin in the ocean? What can we learn from the oldest minerals on earth? The oldest rocks? The oldest fossils? How did the appearance of oxygen affect the living world and also contribute to the formation of giant deposits of iron and uranium? How does the distribution of oceans and continents, in interaction with the evolution of the sun, affect our survival today? And how can we link the inexorable cooling of our planet to global warming? The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and the oldest traces of life on Earth are a little over 3.5 billion years old. In those early days, the Earth and life looked very different. They have both undergone a long period of evolution. They have also influenced each other many times and continue to do so today…
Knowing more about the Earth’s past helps us better understand today’s climate and the mechanisms behind current changes to the environment.