Objective
Little has challenged our understanding of climate change more so than the abruptness with which large-scale shifts in
temperature
occurred during the last glacial period. Atmospheric temperature jumps of 8-16°C, occurring within decades over Greenland,
were closely
matched by rapid changes in North Atlantic sea surface temperatures. Though these climatic instabilities are
well-documented in various
proxy records, the causal mechanisms of such short-lived oscillations remain poorly understood. Two hypotheses have been
proposed:
one relating to the behaviour of the ocean circulation and the other to the dynamics of the atmosphere. Testing these
hypotheses,
however, is severely hampered by dating uncertainties that prevent the integration of proxy records on common timescales.
As a result
unravelling the lead/lag responses (hence cause and effect) between the Earth’s climate components is currently beyond our
reach.
TRACE will exploit a powerful new approach whereby microscopic traces of volcanic events are employed to precisely
correlate proxy
records from the North Atlantic region to assess the phasing relationships between the atmosphere and the ocean during
these rapid
climatic events. Volcanic layers have the unique advantage of representing fixed time-lines between different proxy records.
This
correlation tool has experienced a considerable step-change in recent years, with invisible layers of volcanic ash traced over
much wider
geographical regions than previously thought. What is more, recent work has identified new, previously unknown eruptions -
several of
which coincide with the rapid climatic jumps imprinted in the proxy records. Thus tephra isochrones represent (perhaps the
only)
independent constraints for resolving past events on decadal timescales.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesgeologyvolcanology
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
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Call for proposal
ERC-2010-StG_20091028
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
ERC-SG - ERC Starting GrantHost institution
SA2 8PP Swansea
United Kingdom