palaeoclimate

Imaggeo on Mondays: Our QUEST for innovative tools to understand changing environments and climates

Sebastian Breitenbach and Adam Hartland June 10, 2019

A multi-year cave monitoring programme in New Zealand's Waipuna Cave focusses on developing novel quantitative proxies for palaeoclimatology. We measure drip rate, temperature, electrical conductivity and many other parameters, analyse the isotopic and elemental composition of the water, and compare our results with the length and origin of recorded rainfall. With our data, we hope to better understand the interplay of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation and the Southern Westerlies and the local response to changes in their dynamics. This monitoring is part of the EU Marie Curie RISE Project "QUantitative palaeoEnvironments from SpeleoThems – QUEST". Credit: Sebastian Breitenbach (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

The photo shown here shows typical sampling work underground. You can see Ola Kwiecien and Cinthya Nava Fernandez, researchers at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, collecting dripwater in New Zealand’s Waipuna Cave as part of a four-year EU-funded monitoring programme. Our research aims at developing innovative geochemical indicators that we can use to quantify changes in the hydrological system ...[Read More]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Exploring the underground cryosphere

Olivia Trani March 11, 2019

Underground cryosphere. Credit: Renato R. Colucci (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

The winter season is a good time to take advantage of cold weather activities, whether that’s hitting the ski slopes or warming up by a fire, but for Renato R. Colucci, it’s also one of the best time’s to study the Earth’s underground cryosphere. Colucci, who took this featured photograph, is a researcher at Italian Institute for Marine Sciences (ISMAR) of the National Research Council (CNR) and i ...[Read More]

GeoTalk: the climate communication between Earth’s polar regions

Olivia Trani December 21, 2018

Meet Christo Buizert, Assistant Professor in Geology and Geophysics at Oregon State University and recipient of the 2018 Climate: Past, Present & Future Division Outstanding Early Career Scientists Award. (Credit: EGU/Foto Pflugel)

Geotalk is a regular feature highlighting early career researchers and their work. In this interview, we caught up with Christo Buizert, an assistant professor at Oregon State University in Corvallis, who works to reconstruct and understand climate change events from the past. Christo’s analysis of ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica helped reveal links between climate change events from the l ...[Read More]

Geosciences Column: How climate change put a damper on the Maya civilisation

Olivia Trani October 25, 2018

Overview of the central plaza of the Maya city of Palenque (Chiapas, Mexico), one of the many remnants of the Maya civilisation. (Credit: Jan Harenburg via Wikimedia Commons)

More than 4,000 years ago, when the Great Pyramid of Giza and Stonehenge were being built, the Maya civilisation emerged in Central America. The indigenous group prospered for thousands of years until its fall in the 13th century (potentially due to severe drought). However, thousands of years before this collapse, severely soggy conditions lasting for many centuries likely inhibited the civilisat ...[Read More]