PALEOVAR March 7th, 2008
Little is known about how climate variability will respond to global warming or how regional climate will change. Paleoclimatic data provide information on climate variability beyond the range of modern human experience. Project PALEOVAR is a coordinated approach to understand the interaction between short-term variability and the climatic mean state over the past 50,000 years. Data sources include ice cores and speleothem (cave formation) records from continental settings and marine sedimentary records.
Data analysis techniques include the adaptation of state-of-the-art statistical methods to the study of paleoclimate time series. Integration of paleoclimate data with a hierarchy of models include a global Earth System Model of Intermediate Complexity and regional and global scale atmospheric general circulation models.
The PALEOVAR project is funded by the Paleoclimate program of the National Science Foundation through 2011.
PALEOVAR Faculty Advisors:
Oregon State University, College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences
- Dr. Nicklas Pisias-Paleoceanographic reconstruction, geostatistics
- Dr. Alan Mix-Ocean and continental paleoclimate, isotope geochemistry
- Dr. Andreas Schmittner-Coupled atmosphere-ocean-biogeochemical models
Oregon State University, Department of Geosciences
- Dr. Ed Brook-Ice core paleoclimatology and atmospheric chemistry
- Dr. Peter Clark-Paleoclimatology and glaciers and ice sheets
- Dr. Steve Hostetler (USGS)-Regional and global atmospheric climate models
University of Oregon, Department of Geography
- Dr. Pat Bartlein-Continental climate reconstruction and statistical modeling
Prof. Larry Edwards and Dr. Hai Cheng from the University of Minnesota Newton Horace Winchell School of Earth Sciences are also part of the PALEOVAR project.
Alan Mix taking dripwater samples in a cave.
Bubbles of air in ice from a polar ice core.
Multi corer.
Cave.
Needles used to crash ice for the extraction of air in bubbles.
Ocean sediment core.
Ice core.
Wallowa moraines.
Yellowstone moraine.