GFZ German research centre for geo sciences

An exceptional discovery of 256 individual pine trees within the town of Zürich in 2013 (referred to as the BINZ material), for which first radiocarbon dates now suggest a time window roughly between 14 000 and 11 000 BP, implies strong evidence to fill existing gaps in the Late Glacial tree-ring chronology around 12 500 BP.

Africa is very likely to warm more than global average during this century. Especially (semi-)arid regions are endangered to experience particularly high warming and possibly catastrophic droughts. The prediction of the climate change impact on these regions requires information about the past climate conditions in high temporal and spatial resolution. There is a massive lack of transregional highly time resolved climate proxy data for the African continent.

The overall projective of CAHOL is the reconstruction of the Holocene climate, with special focus on tipping points, from continental and marine archives to better understand the driving mechanisms of abrupt climate changes and the interaction between the monsoon and west wind climates. CAHOL is part of the BMBF research program CAME II: “Crossing climatic tipping points – consequences for Central Asia“.

In the PALESCA project, local actors in close cooperation with scientific and governmental institutions assess critical environmental changes and develop approaches to solving problems at two focus sites in Kyrgyzstan.

INTegrating Ice core, MArine, and TErrestrial records – INTIMATE: INTIMATE is an open network for all interested scientists working on palaeoclimate reconstructions in the period 60,000 to 8000 years ago.

Several joint expeditions by Russian, American, and German scientist mainly in 1998, 2000, and 2003 revealed that the sedimentary record of 12 km wide lake El'gygytgyn (Chukotka Peninsula, Northeast Siberia) filling a meteorite impact crater, has a high potential for a long-term paleoclimate study. Sediment cores were drilled 2008/2009 during an ICDP campaign.

PROGRESS stands for "Potsdam Research Cluster for Georisk Analysis, Environmental Change and Sustainability". It is a joint research project subsidised by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) within the framework of „Advanced Research and Innovation in the New Federal States.

The joint research project CADY - Central Asian climate DYnamics aims to reconstruct the Holocene climate variability and regional hydrology in Central Asia along three transects on the Tibetan Plateau. CADY is part of the BMBF research program "Central Asia and Tibet: Monsoon dynamics and geo-ecosystems".

The EU-INTAS/DFG/ Project CLIMAN and a NATO project brought together a multidisciplinary team of scientists, including physical oceanographers, chemists, biologists, palaeoecologists, sedimentologists, geographers, and archaeologists.

DecLakes, a project within the ESF Eurocores EuroCLIMATE program, will provide six well-dated high-resolution records of the oxygen-isotope composition of past precipitation derived from ostracods in the profundal lake sediments from the Northern, Western and Southern margin of the Alps and from North-eastern Poland.

Varved lake sediments have been recognised as key archives for palaeoclimate reconstruction on the continents.

Investigations of the East Asian monsoon system over the last glacial-interglacial cycle are based on sediments of small lakes with high sedimentation rates from South- and Northeast-China. Main aspects of palaeoclimatic reconstructions are variations of precipitation and dust flux, as well as vegetation dynamics.

The Near East region encompasses a unique set of contrasting environments, where changes in hydrological regimes are probably the most prominent expressions of climate variability. Environmental changes in this region had a profound impact on prehistoric and early historic cultural evolution of mankind.

Pollen and diatom assemblages from annually laminated lake sediments record vegetation and environmental histories.

Lake Baikal represents one of the few Eurasian, continental, lacustrine sites with an extremely long, uninterrupted sedimentary record (spanning potentially 25 million years) that has been exploited for high resolution palaeoclimate studies.

Oscillating between lacustrine and marine stages during the Late Quaternary, the Black Sea holds unique sedimentary archives with potential for high-resolution paleoclimate reconstructions.

The palaeolake deposits of Piànico (Southern Alps, Bergamo, Italy) include a continuous succession of ca 15,500 exceptionally preserved calcite varves that formed under peak interglacial conditions.

The ESF EuroCLIMATE project CHALLACEA aims to provide a continuous high-resolution multi-proxy record of temperature and moisture-balance variability in equatorial East Africa from the Last Glacial Maximum (25 ka BP) to the present.

Within this project in cooperation with the CNR institute for ecosystem research (ISE) in Pallanza spatial patterns of sediment deposition related to major flood events are investigated.

Annually laminated sediment sequences along a transect from the Cariaco Basin (off Venezuela) across lakes in East and Central Mexico to the Pacific coast are ideal archives to study Holocene rainfall distribution in Mesoamerica, determined by ITCZ dynamics.

Sediment cores from the Tswaing Crater are one of the few long continental climate archives of southern Africa. They are used to unravel the southern hemisphere climate history of the last 200 ka.

Arctic marine sediments turned out to ideal recorders of geomagnetic field variations such as short reversal excursions

Stratigraphy, from Latin stratum + Greek graphia, is the description of all rock bodies forming the Earth's crust and their organization into distinctive, useful, mappable units based on their inherent properties or attributes in order to establish their distribution and relationship in space and their succession in time, and to interpret geologic history.

Tree ring parameters like ring width, wood density and stable isotope ratios have been used for a long time in areas outside the tropics as powerful tools for the retrospective analysis of tree growth and its response to environmental factors.

This project funded by the International Bureau of the BMBF studies „Past and Present Response of Woody C3 and C4 Plants to Climate Change using Sophora chrysophylla (C3) and Euphorbia olowaluana (C4) trees in Hawai`i, USA“

The use of confocal laser scanning microscopy CLSM in quantitative wood anatomy as a novel advance for developing long chronologies of wood cell structure measurements.

The project aimed on a Holocene palaeoenvironmental and palaeoclimatic reconstruction for the western margin of Europe on the basis of the lake sediment record of the brackish karst Lake An Loch Mór (Island of Inish Oirr, Galway Bay).

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