Climate: Past, Present & Future

Magnetic minerals: storytellers of environmental and climatic conditions

Stephanie Scheidt, Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, University of Cologne, Germany July 9, 2019

Curves representing the magnetic signals of minerals

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

Svenja Riedesel, Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, United Kingdom September 3, 2018

The glowing sediment

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]

What can the Cretaceous tell us about our climate?

Philip Pika, PhD researcher, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium August 20, 2018

Figure 1: Illustration of Cretaceous landscape and climate. (Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/history_of_the_earth/Cretaceous, visited 14.7.2018)

The Cretaceous The Cretaceous period features a particularly interesting climatic episode in the Earth’s geological history. It follows the Jurassic Period, better known as the time the dinosaurs inhabited Earth and spanned the period between 145.5 and 65.5 million years ago. The Cretaceous is the last period of the Mesozoic Era, which ends with a well-known mass extinction event. At the end of th ...[Read More]