The Australasian region covers a vast number of ecosystems and provides a diverse range of paleoenvironmental and climatic archives |
Australasia is a region of Oceania comprising Australia, New Zealand, and neighboring islands in the Indian, Southern, and Pacific Oceans. As part of the PAGES regional 2k effort, the Aus2K group considered the land and ocean areas bounded by 110°E–180°E and 0°S–50°S.
Reconstructions of past climate variability from Australasia are not only regionally important but are also globally significant, as the area contains core dynamical regions of several major atmospheric and oceanic modes that influence both hemispheres and may be highly sensitive to future climate change e.g. El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the Inter-decadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO), Australasian Monsoon, Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), and the Sub Tropical Ridge (STR).
The extent of Australasia's annually-resolved paleoclimate record was reviewed by Neukom and Gergis (2012). There are now over 50 individual/composite sites from the region that were consolidated for high resolution climate analysis. While some long tree-ring records from New Zealand and Australia cover the past 2,000 years, annual temperature reconstructions representative of the broad Australasian region are currently only possible over the last millennium.