Environmental Response on Climate Events in the Levant, Near East and SE Europe during the Last 200 ka Based on Long Continental Records
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Principal Investigators: T. Litt, A. Hense, M. Staubwasser
During the first two phases of the CRC 806, work concentrated on the derivation and interpretation of proxy climate and environmental records in the key areas Levant, Black Sea region and the Balkans separately with emphasis of resolving the temporal variability during the Upper Pleistocene and Holocene. However, to expand the picture of seasonal climatic changes around the initial upper Palaeolithic obtained from SE Europe and the Near East, an integrating synoptic view of proxy information from the already available but also from new data sources is planned.
For the second funding period, we used mainly deep drilling cores, obtained from the northern Dead Sea Basin in the framework of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) in 2010/2011. These cores enabled a long sedimentary record that encompasses the last 200 ka. We were focusing on the last glacial-interglacial cycle based on high-resolution pollen analyses. These data have been used for quantitative palaeoclimate reconstructions based on botanical-climatological transfer functions (biome model).
In the future, we particularly focus on:
- Time-series palaeoclimate reconstructions of long continental records based on multi-proxy data for the last 200 ka (E to W climate gradient)
- Tying soil profiles via speleothem records to global climate records
- Tying marker levels and dating information in the palaeoclimate records
- Multiproxy analysis of pollen records and speleothems in terms of general environmental conditions (cooperation with project E7)
- For selected time-slices at well-defined ages reconstruct seasonal temperature fields for SE Europe – Near East by combining proxy data and transfer functions with existing global paleo-climate simulations
- Assessment of the results and the link to the human migration information (cooperation with project B1)
1st Phase - Research Programme | 2nd Phase - Research Programme | |
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