Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our time, but understanding its scope and impact requires a fundamental understanding of natural climate variability, i.e., before humans have dramatically changed the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and altered the processes and resilience of ecosystems on regional to global scales. This focus group investigates climate and ecosystem dynamics both in the Anthropocene, our current epoch marked by human activity, and in the geological past. This includes extreme events, such as heatwaves and floods, but also gradual changes from persistently warmer to colder stages. The group investigates proxy records from various climate archives, such as speleothems, tree rings, marine and terrestrial sediments, and mollusc shells, and applies geochemical methods as well as Earth system modeling to unravel natural climate variability and human-induced changes.Since the pressing challenges of the Anthropocene, such as global warming, ocean acidification, and overexploitation of resources, require a holistic understanding of the Earth System and considering the high complexity of this system, we focus on new, inherently interdisciplinary, methods and approaches.
The focus group brings together expertise from geosciences, (atmospheric) chemistry, paleoecology, and environmental geochemistry, spanning multiple Max Planck Institutes and JGU departments. Key themes include past and present air quality, abrupt and gradual climate change, proxy development and multi-proxy approaches, volcanic and solar forcing, and the influence of climate on societal development. A particular focus is on reconstructing past climate and ecosystems to provide baseline data for future projections.
