Research
My research seeks to develop an integrated, multi-disciplinary perspective of climate change on Earth; one that unifies and integrates diverse concepts from paleoclimatology, volcanology, oceanography, and geochemistry (among other disciplines). The goal of this work is to provide a foundation from which the causes of past shifts in the climate can be better understood, and subsequently aid effective preparations for the future.
Specific interests include:
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The timing, severity, and impacts of abrupt shifts in the Earth's climate
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How we can use stalagmites, lake sediments, and ice cores to understand why these rapid shifts occurred
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The impact(s) of large, explosive volcanic eruptions on the pre-industrial climate system
Holocene hydroclimate, drought dynamics and environmental change recorded in multiple archives from SW Asia (MITRA)
SW Asia (Eastern Turkey, Iraq and Iran) is an important region for paleoclimate and paleoenvironmental research as it is a sensitive hotspot to climate change, where water availability, as an often scarce and unequally distributed resource, is a key-parameter for societal stability today and in the past. Our understanding of the causes and patterns of climatic changes and their influence on the environment in SW Asia has remained uncertain due to the brevity of instrumental records, and scarcity of precisely-dated and highly resolved climatic and environmental reconstructions. To go beyond scarce existing reconstructions, this SNSF Sinergia project termed MITRA (named after the Indo-Iranian god and spirit of the rain and of the sun), will develop a dense network of different paleo records and climate model simulations to understand past changes of the complex climate in SW Asia, in particular the hydroclimate. We will use the most promising and most widespread archives in SW Asia, namely speleothems, lake and marine sediments along a nearly 2,000 km-long N-S transect stretching from Eastern Turkey to the Persian Gulf.
This work is funded by Swiss National Science Foundation Sinergia project 'MITRA', and conducted in collaboration with researchers based at:
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University of Basel, Switzerland
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University of Bern, Switzerland
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Aix Marseille Université, France
Exploring the Quaternary mercury cycle
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The mercury (Hg) cycle is significant on a global scale, due to the negative impacts of Hg bioaccumulation on terrestrial ecosystems. Increasing human activity has impacted this cycle through (1) potentially irreversible perturbation to the global temperatures, precipitation patterns, and atmospheric circulation, and (2) mass Hg contamination of terrestrial and aquatic environments. A mechanistic understanding of terrestrial Hg cycling on long (>1000-years) timescales is therefore crucial: to assess how natural, and human-induced climate changes may alter the speed, intensity, and balance of this cycle in the future. This project will explore how lake sediment records encode changes in the terrestrial Hg cycle, and how this information can be integrated with other high-resolution paleoclimate archives to consider how human-induced perturbations could amplify these natural changes in the future.
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Slide 1: Lakes Ohrid (Macedonia/Albania) and Prespa (Greece, Macedonia/Albania)
Slide 2: Lake Bosumtwi (Ghana).
Slide 3: Lake El'gygytgyn (Russia)
This work is funded by European Research Council consolidator grant V-ECHO, and conducted in collaboration with researchers based at:
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University of Oxford, UK
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British Geological Survey, UK
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University of Cologne, Germany
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College of Charleston, USA
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University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
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University of Texas at Austin, USA
Millennia-scale interactions between volcanoes and the climate system
Understanding the causes of abrupt climate change is crucially important for quantifying present and future climate stability. Between 120,000 and 11,000 years ago Earth’s climate was punctuated by rapid and aperiodic shifts between relatively warm (interstadial) and relatively cold (stadial) conditions referred to as Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O events. However, the trigger for these rapid shifts remains ambiguous. This project seeks to unify existing mechanistic frameworks that seek to explain the underlying driving causes of D-O events, and subsequently assess if volcanism could be a key missing component of these frameworks
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Figure from Paine et al. (2021) Supereruption doublet at a climate transition. Communications Earth & Environment (https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-021-00293-6)
Large Northern Hemisphere volcanic eruptions as a possible cause of Holocene cold events
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The Holocene (10,000 years ago to present) contains multiple periods of rapid cooling, centered on the North Atlantic but ultimately detected in records across the Northern Hemisphere. Sulphate-rich volcanism, solar output reductions, and meltwater injections into the Atlantic Ocean are all triggers which have been suggested for the largest of these events. In this project, we will be using advanced statistical analyses of existing eruption and climate records to explore whether there exists a significant link between accurately dated, large Northern Hemisphere eruptions and cold event onset timing, and hence whether hemisphere-specific volcanic aerosol forcing could have been a critical driver of rapid climate change during the Holocene.
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Slide 1: Okmok caldera (source: Chris Burkard)
This work is in collaboration with researchers based at:
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University of Durham, UK
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Penn State University, USA
FUCINO - the longest and continuous terrestrial archive in the MEditerranean area recording the last five Million years the Earth system history (MEME)
During the last 5 million years, the Earth climate system underwent a series of major changes. Relatively little is known about the impact of these changes on terrestrial environments, calling for development of long, continuous, high-resolved and chronologically well-constrained terrestrial records to characterize and explore these impacts in closer detail. The Fucino Basin, central Italy, has the potential to meet all these of these requisites, as it is the largest Central Apennine basin hosting a continuous and thick lacustrine succession from the early Pliocene to recent historical times. The aim of MEME is to gain insights into the mode and tempo of Plio-Quaternary geo-bio-environmental changes at different spatial and temporal scales, by extending the independently-dated Fucino lacustrine record back to 5 Ma.
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Click here to learn more about the MEME project.