CL
Climate: Past, Present & Future

Climate of the Past

InterArctic project: understanding the interaction between artic environments and societies

September 21, 2020
InterArctic project: understanding the interaction between artic environments and societies

The InterArctic project (Fig. 1) focuses on vulnerability, resilience and adaptation of northern societies facing global change. The current rapid warming of Arctic and Subarctic climates has already produced many changes in the social, economic and cultural behaviour of the populations inhabiting these regions and more changes are expected to come. In this context, looking at the past provides th ...[Read More]

Learning lessons from the past to inform the future

August 21, 2020
Learning lessons from the past to inform the future

  A fairly recent blog post here reiterated the compelling comparison between the current COVID-19 crisis and the ongoing climate emergency, focusing on extreme events such as hurricanes, heatwaves and severe rainfall-related flooding, all of which are likely to get worse as the climate warms (Langendijk & Osman 2020).  This comparison has been made by us Climate Scientists since the COVI ...[Read More]

Weather hidden within dusty parchments and weighty tomes—historical climatology and its contribution to our understanding of the past climate

and April 7, 2020
Weather hidden within dusty parchments and weighty tomes—historical climatology and its contribution to our understanding of the past climate

What is historical climatology? Historical climatology is an interdisciplinary research field between paleoclimatology and the historical sciences, that explores the archives of societies to examine the climate of the past. Archives of society mean all man-made remains of the past in contrast to archives of nature. The latter represent physical remains of natural processes such as tree rings and s ...[Read More]

Are the risks of zoonotic diseases rising in the Anthropocene due to climate change?

and March 16, 2020
Are the risks of zoonotic diseases rising in the Anthropocene due to climate change?

The recent coronavirus outbreak (i.e., nCovID-19; Fig. 1) has caused global panic, along with widespread travel bans, home quarantines and country-wide lockdowns. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared nCoVID-19 as a pandemic as of March 11th, 2020 (WHO, 2020). To tackle this global health crisis, scientists are attempting to synthesize a vaccine, while countries are trying to mitigate the n ...[Read More]

Dead Sea – lively stories of the past

February 25, 2020
Dead Sea – lively stories of the past

The Dead Sea is dead. Nothing can live there except for specialized microbes. The water with a salinity multiple times higher than seawater prevents a colonization by higher life forms. However, it does not prevent the input of organic material that can tell us stories about the past. A unique sediment record The Dead Sea, located at the lowest elevation on Earth – currently about 430 m below sea ...[Read More]

Palaeoclimate Data Syntheses: Opportunities and Challenges

and November 21, 2019
Palaeoclimate Data Syntheses: Opportunities and Challenges

Reconstructing past climate states from geological records is crucial for understanding the causal mechanisms that originated them. These can occur at time-scales which are much longer than the periods for which humans have been measuring climate variables such as temperature in meteorological stations. Such climate reconstructions provide a long-term context to the magnitude of the current anthro ...[Read More]

Habits in numerical model construction

October 2, 2019
Habits in numerical model construction

  Numerical models are omnipresent in climate research. Constructed to understand the past, to forecast future climate and to gain new knowledge on natural processes and interactions, they enable the simulation of experiments at otherwise unreachable time and spatial scales. These instruments have long been considered to be fed – let even determined – by either theories or observations alone. ...[Read More]

Magnetic minerals: storytellers of environmental and climatic conditions

July 9, 2019
Magnetic minerals: storytellers of environmental and climatic conditions

Name of proxy Environmental Magnetism (also known as enviromagnetics) Type of record Environment and climate proxy Paleoenvironment Sedimentary environments (for the most part) Period of time investigated Present times to millions of years (depending on the preservation conditions) How does it work? Magnetism is a physical property that results from the behaviour of elementary particles in any sub ...[Read More]

How earthworms can help us understand past climates?

December 19, 2018
How earthworms can help us understand past climates?

Name of proxy Earthworm calcite granules (ECG) Type of record Paleotemperature and paleoprecipitation reconstruction; radiocarbon dating Paleoenvironment Continental environments – loess/paleosol sequences Period of time investigated Mostly Last full Glacial cycle – from 112,000-15,000 years Before Present (BP) (or older depending on the preservation of the granules). How does it work? Earth ...[Read More]

How glowing sediment can help to decipher the Earth’s past climate !

and September 3, 2018
How glowing sediment can help to decipher the Earth’s past climate !

The last 2.5 Million years of the Earth’s history (termed Quaternary) are characterised by climatic cycles oscillating between warm (interglacial) and cold (glacial) periods. To be able to fully understand and interpret past climate variations the development of accurate and precise chronological techniques is crucial. Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating is a strong geochronological too ...[Read More]