Climate of the Past

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

Chantal Camenisch, Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research and Institute of History, Section of Economic, Social and Environmental History, University of Bern, Switzerland. April 7, 2020

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?

Ichiko Sugiyama, Ph.D. Candidate in the Faculty of Chemistry in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel March 16, 2020

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

Dr. Andrea Miebach, postdoc at the Institute of Geosciences, University of Bonn, Germany February 25, 2020

Dead Sea (photo: Andrea Miebach).

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

Laia Comas-Bru (School of Archaeology, Geography & Environmental Sciences at Reading University, UK) and Nikita Kaushal (Asian School of the Environment, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore). November 21, 2019

The Cango Cave (South Africa). Photo taken by Laia Comas-Bru.

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]