Climate: Past, Present & Future

Detrital zircons: how the age of a resistant mineral can help to reconstruct the climate of the past

Chiara Költringer May 20, 2021

Zircon grains of an igneous rock under the incident light microscope (Image Credit: Martin Lindner).

Name of proxy detrital zircon geochronology Type of record provenance proxy Paleoenvironment any sedimentary environment in a geologically diverse and diagnostic area Period of time investigated any Period of the geological timescale of the Earth, during which sedimentary deposits were formed How does it work? Igneous rocks form through assemblages of minerals crystallising from melt. While ...[Read More]

How humans are influencing climate change and its significance in defining a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene

Colin Waters, Colin Summerhayes and Simon Turner April 26, 2021

Modern atmospheric CO2 increases, driven mainly by human activities, have led to a marked increase in global mean temperatures and rates of sea-level rise in part through melting of ice-sheets. (© C N Waters).

The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) is the body tasked to propose a formal definition for the Anthropocene as a geological time unit. Join us at the EGU2021 General Assembly on Wednesday 28th April at 14:15-15:00 CEST for a series of presentations on the Anthropocene in session SSP2.6. The Anthropocene concept Geologists cope with the enormity of 4.5 billion years of Earth history by divid ...[Read More]

Generation #polarprediction

François Massonnet April 14, 2021

Arctic reflection by Fabien Darrouzet, Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA-IASB), Brussels, Belgium. Credit: Fabien Darrouzet (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu).

More than 11 years ago, I joined the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) in Belgium as a teaching assistant. The 2007-2009 International Polar Year (IPY), a worldwide collaborative effort aiming at better understanding our polar regions, had just finished, and the scientific community was concerned about the sudden drop in the summer Arctic sea ice extent that had occurred two years befor ...[Read More]

Presenting a new European loess map

Janina Nett and Stephan Pötter March 31, 2021

Loess is a silt-sized, aeolian sediment that was produced in large quantities in past geological eras of mid-latitude Europe and Asia, among others (Fig. 1). It is used in Quaternary science to infer about past climatic and environmental conditions. Generally, layers of loess formed during cold and dry periods, while soils formed within/on top the loess during warmer and wetter periods. These soil ...[Read More]