Read the latest e-news

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Published: Wednesday, 19 June 2019 16:18

Read about the latest PAGES' news, meetings and opportunities from around the world in this month's e-news.

Highlights include the full chronological listing of PAGES sessions at the 20th INQUA Congress in July, the new "Find data" website tab, PAGES working group news and meeting announcements, recent products, IPCC updates, ECN updates, and other announcements.

GCD used in Amazonia paper

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Published: Wednesday, 19 June 2019 12:17

A new Nature Ecology & Evolution paper uses PAGES' Global Paleofire Working Group's Global Charcoal Database to show climate change had a significant impact on indigenous Amazonian communities before the arrival of Europeans in 1492.

Jonas Gregorio de Souza et al. review the most relevant cultural changes seen in the archaeological record of six different regions within Greater Amazonia during late pre-Columbian times. They compare the chronology of those cultural transitions with high-resolution regional palaeoclimate proxies to show that, while some societies faced major reorganization during periods of climate change, others were unaffected and even flourished.

Access the paper "Climate change and cultural resilience in late pre-Columbian Amazonia" here.

Access the Global Charcoal Database here.

Find out more about the Global Paleofire Working Group 2 here.

Ocean circulation, CO2 paper

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Published: Monday, 17 June 2019 13:50

A recent Science Advances paper from members of PAGES' Ocean Circulation and Carbon Cycling (OC3) working group aims to accurately quantify ocean carbon components to measure carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations during glacial periods.

The prevailing hypothesis for lower atmospheric CO2 concentrations during glacial periods is an increased efficiency of the ocean’s biological pump. However, tests of this and other hypotheses have been hampered by the difficulty to accurately quantify ocean carbon components.

Authors Samar Khatiwala, Andreas Schmittner and Juan Muglia use an observationally constrained Earth system model to precisely quantify these components and the role that different processes play in simulated glacial-interglacial CO2 variations.

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Paleo contents, IPCC AR6 FOD

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Published: Thursday, 23 May 2019 18:42

Download the excel document (22.7KB) here.

PAGES would like to bring to your attention an opportunity to review the first-order draft (FOD) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 1 (WG1) contribution to IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (AR6).

To facilitate your review of paleoclimate information in the FOD, PAGES and its Early-Career Network (ECN) have assembled a table listing the paleo contents from across the report. Download the excel document shown above.

AR6 does not have a chapter dedicated to paleoclimate. Instead, paleo information is integrated throughout the report. The table of contents will help you locate text and evaluate possible inconsistencies, gaps and overlaps across the chapters. It also highlights sections that contain assessment statements using IPCC controlled vocabulary (e.g. "high confidence"). These key statements are often featured in the Executive Summaries, which feed the Summary for Policy Makers.

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PAGES/WDS-Paleo agreement

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Published: Thursday, 23 May 2019 09:45

PAGES is pleased to have recently signed a scientific agreement with NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information - Center for Weather and Climate, World Data Service for Paleoclimatology (WDS-Paleo).

The interrelated nature of PAGES and WDS-Paleo dates back to our beginnings in 1993, and earlier this month a formal agreement was reached.

PAGES' Executive Director Dr. Marie-France Loutre is excited by the formalization of this long-standing relationship.

"Most importantly it re-establishes a direct link and opens the doors to strengthen and reinforce connections and collaborations between PAGES and NOAA WDS-Paleo regarding data access, availability, and sharing," Dr Loutre said.

"Identification of the essential metadata to be collected during the data archiving procedure is a high priority. I am convinced that both PAGES and WDS-Paleo will benefit from this new agreement."

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Chilean socio-cultural complexity

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Published: Wednesday, 22 May 2019 08:44

A paper published yesterday by PAGES' PEOPLE 3000 working group integrates archeological and paleoenvironmental records to test the hypothesis that Chilean societies progressively escalated their capacity to shape national biophysical systems, as socio-cultural complexity and pressures on natural resources increased over the last three millennia.

Authors Eugenia M. Gayo et al. demonstrate that Pre-Columbian societies intentionally transformed Chile’s northern and central regions by continuously adjusting socio-cultural practices and/or incorporating technologies that guaranteed resource access and social wealth. This research provides crucial "baselines" to delineate safe operating spaces for future socio-ecological systems.

Access the Elementa Science of the Anthropocene paper "Geohistorical records of the Anthropocene in Chile" here.

Find out more about PEOPLE 3000 and join their mailing list here.