Reading the palaeoclimatic and –environmental history from lake sediments – Examples from the ICLEA key site Lake Czechowskie (N Poland)
- Date: Sep 20, 2016
- Time: 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Florian Ott
- Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Section 5.2 – Climate Dynamics and Landscape Evolution
- Location: MPI SHH Jena
- Room: Villa V03
- Host: Department of Archaeology
The consequences of climate change on the human habitat are under great debate and yet not precisely predictable, why the differentiation between natural climate variability and human induced climate change is one of the major challenges for the scientific community. The overarching goal is to understand the climate system on various spatiotemporal scales from which most are beyond a human lifetime perception. Thus, the period of instrumental climate observations is not sufficient alone, since only high frequency changes are fully captured. In order to decipher and understand the mechanisms of climate variability the investigation of geological archives is used as they continuously record past climatic and environmental changes. In the continental area, lake records provide ideal natural archives to study the complex interactions between the climate and the ecosystem and, if located amidst the human habitat, the influences and responses of human activities. To differentiate between these impacts high resolution lake records are essential as they sufficiently capture the different degree of climate variability and act as a natural “memory” far beyond the period of human induced changes. This talk will give an overview of the annually laminated (varved) record of Lake Czechowskie, located in N Poland. It focusses on its sedimentological and chronological framework with examples of centennial and millennial scale climate oscillations and climate trends, respectively. It will further give insights in the interdisciplinary research approach of ICLEA (Virtual Institute of Integrated Climate and Landscape Evolution Analyses).