Carles Pelejero

Institut de Ciències del Mar

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics

Born in Barcelona in 1968, Carles Pelejero graduated in Chemistry at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1991, with a speciality in Organic Chemistry. He obtained his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Barcelona in 2000, doing research in the fields of paleoceanography and paleoclimatology through the study of molecular biomarkers in deep sea sediments. He then spent four years of postdoctoral research in Australia, at the Australian National University and Geoscience Australia. There, he developed new methodologies for the elemental and isotopic analysis of marine biogenic carbonates using MC-ICPMS and TIMS. In 2005 he moved to the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC), in Barcelona, with a "Ramón y Cajal" contract. In October 2006 he was appointed ICREA Research Professor.


Research interests

I am interested in understanding and quantifying how the marine environment and climate are changing today, in which ways they have changed in the past, and how will they influence marine organisms and ecosystems in the future. To this end, I analyse deep sea sediments and corals as archives of changes in the past, use systems to monitor the present, and run manipulative experiments in aquaria to simulate the future. A main environmental issue that I am currently studying is the progressive acidification of the oceans that is occurring due to the marine absorption of part of the CO2 that humans are emitting to the atmosphere. I am also setting up culture-based systems to calibrate paleoceanographic proxies in corals, making use of the aquaria facilities at the ICM.


Selected research activities

– Supervisor of the M.Sc. Thesis ‘Paleoclimatic reconstruction of the last 420 kyr in the Strait of Sicily’ by Sara Cobacho, Oceanography and Marine Environmental Management, University of Barcelona.

– Supervisor of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, European Commission Horizon 2020 to Lydia Kapsenberg for the project EVOMA: The influence of Environmental Variability On Mussel Aquaculture and adaptation in the context of global ocean change (H2020-MSCA-IF-2016, C.N. 747637).

– PI of the MINECO Project SCORE: Sediments and cold water Corals to address key questions of the Oceans in the past: two case-study Regions and one Experiment (CGL2015-68194-R).

– Coordinator of the Research Group on Marine Biogeochemistry and Global Change. Generalitat de Catalunya (2017SGR1011).

– Participant of the European Commission Horizon 2020 Project CERES: Climate change and European aquatic RESources (H2020-BG-2015-2, C.N. 678193)

– Conference: “Ground-truthing paleo-proxy calibrations in Desmophyllum dianthus deep-sea corals using long-term aquaria cultures”, AGU Fall Meeting, Washington D.C., US.

– Reviewer of the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, to be published in 2019.

– Lecturer of ocean acidification impacts for students of the Degree in Marine Sciences (fourth year) of the University of Barcelona.

– Participation in the ‘Science Day at Schools’ with a talk on ‘Our (ir)responsibilities with Water Planet’ at Les Cases dels Mestres, with students from IES Manolo Hugué and Pic del Vent (High School, 15-16 years old), Caldes de Montbui, Barcelona.