5 December 2025

3:25 PM – 4:10 PM

Amphi Petit Kursaal

Éric Descourvières

With a PhD in Automation (microtechnology) and an unusual background as an associate professor of mechanics, Éric Descourvières has been teaching engineering, system design, and innovation/creativity for three decades in higher education at universities (in eco-design and eco-engineering programs), engineering schools (mechatronics, microtechnology, luxury goods, health, and biomedical engineering) and in preparatory science classes. Winner of the first university miniature drone competition, he was awarded a silver medal by the Société d’Encouragement au Progrès (Society for the Encouragement of Progress) at the Senate. Also a climate researcher and aeronautics teacher in France and French Polynesia, he is a navigator and diver. He is concerned about marine life, rising sea levels, and has observed coral bleaching; these are concrete realities. Invited by the CNRS Science4Reefs foundation to a workshop bringing together scientists and artists in the lagoon of Moorea, he has refined his knowledge and is working with marine biologists to develop new micro-technologies to increase our knowledge and safeguard 500-million-year-old corals, which are essential to global biodiversity and extremely vulnerable to temperature variations.
Photo Credit: Olivier Anrigo

What is the energy limit for ocean biodiversity?

Following on from a presentation in the spring by glaciologist Dr. Heïdi Sevestre on the rate of melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and the creation of an educational poster presented at the Institut Universitaire de France symposium based on a publication co-authored by 54 international researchers, “Record High Temperatures in the Ocean in 2024,” this communication recontextualizes the current oceanic and planetary situation. This is not simply a matter of warming, but of runaway ocean energy with systemic consequences. I will outline the main orders of magnitude—physical, chemical, energetic, temporal, and astronomical—as well as historical benchmarks in biology and ecology to shed light on the scale of the phenomena currently underway. Finally, I will propose some analogies to grasp these scales, drawing on the question of the value of artificial monetary units and historical comparisons (fifty years of nuclear testing and the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan 80 years ago). However, analysis of the dangerously rising CO2 curve suggests a solution in the form of an oscillation due to beneficial summer photosynthesis in the air and sea.