Reading the climatic signs

To predict the future you must understand the past, say Sebastien Bertrand and Frank Lamy of the CLIVASA project; who explain why gathering, analysing and interpreting paleoclimate data is crucial to improving our understanding of Earth’s climate, how it is formed, and how it will evolve.

 Paleoclimate data plays a central role in efforts to improve our understanding of the global climate. Data gathered from ice sheets, tree rings, corals, and sediment cores can be used to generate an accurate picture of how our climate has evolved over time, and hence to inform models predicting likely future changes. However, although very much aware of the wider potential of this kind of work CLIVASA (Climate Variability in Southern America) project coordinator Sebastien Bertrand says his initiative is currently focused on more immediate objectives.

“The overall goal of this geological and paleoclimate project is to collect and analyse sediment cores and then interpret that data in terms of past changes in climate. We then give this data to other people who are currently modelling the climate in different regions of the globe,” he explains. “We have a lot of paleoclimate data from the Northern Hemisphere – from Europe, the US and the North Atlantic for example, but there is still a comparative lack of data from the Southern Hemisphere.”

“The project is focused on improving our understanding of the climate of the last 18,000 years in this region of the Southern Hemisphere by gathering and analysing sediment cores from lakes and fjords to generate accurate records. We are also trying to improve the temporal resolution of the paleoclimate records we are generating. Very high-resolution records are needed if we are to precisely detect rapid climate changes in the past.” The data will then be compared to that from the Northern Hemisphere. “From there we can include this data within models to try and predict future climate changes.”

The project recently found evidence that abrupt paleoclimate changes appeared first in the Southern Hemisphere and were transferred to the Northern Hemisphere by the circulation of the global oceans, giving the Southern Hemisphere a new and previously unknown role. Bertrand stresses. “From what we are doing in the fjords now it will take another three or four years at least for us to get a really good understanding of what is happening there, but the global relevance of this research means it is work we are determined to pursue.”

Contact Dr Sebastien Bertrand, EU Marie Curie Postdoctoral research fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, at sbertrand@whoi.eu

Published: Monday, 9th November 2009

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