Due to its high hydrographic and climatological diversity the western Iberian margin is one of the best studied European continental margin and sediment cores from this area have yielded break-through results for our understanding of the glacial thermohaline circulation (e.g., Bard et al., 1987; Zahn et al., 1997; Shackleton et al., 2000; Skinner & Shackleton, 2004) and glacial and interglacial ocean - continent interactions (e.g., Sanchez-Goni et al., 2002, 2005; Tzedakis et al., 2004; Moreno et al., 2005).
A great number of puzzle pieces of past climate and hydrographic variability has emerged from the deep-sea cores around Iberia. A lot of those cores were retrieved with RV Marion Dufresne - since the first IMAGES cruise in 1995 RV Marion Dufresne has cored in circum-Iberian waters already 4 times - but they were studied within various national and international projects.
So we see the need to combine and compare the results of all those studies to built a regional knowledge base. We not only intend to make the step from single location time series to multi-site mapping of climatic and hydrographic conditions, but also to find agreements or disagreements between various climatic indicators. Synthesizing the knowledge we have gained in the last two decades and combining "old" and "new" proxy data for water mass and productivity changes, will also provide insights into where additional core sites might be needed to complete the picture or which additional proxy data might be helpful to complement existing ones or to solve conflicts between proxy records.
Topics
1. Surface circulation, biological productivity and possible linkages to wind pattern changes
2. Linking vegetational and climatic change on the continent with hydrographic variations around Iberia
3. MOW and deep/ bottom water variability - connection to/influence on rapid climatic change
4. History of nutrients and oxygen in subsurface and deep water masses
Program
This workshop is sponsored by IMAGES (http://www.images-pages.org/index.php?load=home.html) and PAGES