Topic 3: Lessons from the past
Mission
Understanding the history of polar climate, its response to and impact on different climate states and rates of change.
WP 1 "Past polar climate and inter-hemispheric coupling"
Work Package 1 hosts activities that reconstruct and model rapid to orbital scale (10-105 yr) climate changes during the Pliocene, Pleistocene and Holocene, and attempt to quantify associated thresholds. Atmosphere and ocean signals from ice, marine and land (lake/permafrost) climate records will be merged to decipher their complex inter-relationship and impact, their relation with processes in low and middle latitudes and the effect of external forcing.
WP 2 "Tectonic, climate and biosphere development from greenhouse to ice house"
Within Work Package 2, we will focus on longer time scales (105-107 yr), which allow us to study the effects of Earth’s tectonic evolution on oceanic circulation, glaciations and the transformation from greenhouse to icehouse conditions, as well as on how the earth system regulates greenhouse gas concentrations during the Cenozoic. The polar regions are key locations for examining the Cenozoic response of climate, since the opening of Antarctic and Arctic basins and gateways is believed to have favoured deep water formation in the high latitudes and altered ocean’s surface circulation from a predominantly latitudinal to a meridional flow, thereby changing global heat transport and climate. By combining our reconstructions with climate modelling within both WP1 and WP2 (and T4-WP2), we will be able to derive information on what drives global climate evolution and how change happens over the full range of time scales in Cenozoic climate history.
WP 3 "Proxy development and innovation: the baseline for progress in palaeoclimate research"
As the pace of progress in palaeoclimatology largely depends on the quality and application of proxies as palaeoenvironmental indicators, the challenge of Work Package 3 is to improve the reliability of well-established proxies and to identify and develop new proxies for climate variables for which only inadequate information exists. To better understand the proxy generation, stability and transfer function to actual environment, we plan to optimize the link between models and proxy data by implementing parameterizations based on small-scale process models simulating proxy incorporation into large-scale circulation models including biogeochemical cycles and isotopic tracers. From this, we expect a fundamental understanding about climate shifts and how these climate shifts are recorded in proxy data.