2019 EGU Awards & Medals

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Published: Thursday, 18 October 2018 12:11

PAGES is pleased to announce our Scientific Steering Committee (SSC) member Ed Brook will receive the Hans Oeschger Medal at the 2019 European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, Austria.

This medal was established by the Climate: Past, Present & Future Division in recognition of the scientific achievement of Hans Oeschger. It is awarded to scientists for their outstanding achievements in ice research and/or short-term climatic changes (past, present, future). See the list of previous recipients, which includes many PAGES people, here.

Plus the leader of PAGES' Climate Variability Across Scales (CVAS) working group Shaun Lovejoy will receive the Lewis Fry Richardson Medal.

This medal was established by the Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics Division in recognition of the scientific achievements of Lewis Fry Richardson. It is awarded to scientists for their exceptional contributions to nonlinear geosciences in general. See the list of previous recipients here.

See the full list of 2019 award and medal recipients here.

Flood events in Transylvania

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Published: Wednesday, 17 October 2018 16:04

A new contribution to the Floods Working Group on flood events in Transylvania during the last millennium was published in The Holocene today.

Ioana and Aurel Perșoiu released the first record of past flooding activity from the Carpathian Mountains, Eastern Europe, covering the last ~1100 years, from the early Medieval Warm Period through to the end of the Little Ice Age. Their findings are based on documentary evidence and sedimentary records along Someșul Mic River, one of the main rivers draining this region.

The paper is a product of the Floods cross community workshop held in Grenoble, France, in July 2016.

Find out more about PAGES Floods Working Group and join their mailing list here.

New ECN blog post

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Published: Wednesday, 17 October 2018 10:43

New contribution to the PAGES Early-Career Network (ECN) blog, The Early Pages:

Many studies from the Northern Hemisphere show that a sudden cooling of the climate happened 8,200 years ago - this is known as the 8.2 ka event.

Author Ignacio Jara asks himself what this event looked like in the southern half of our planet. Check out his article on ocean currents and climate, teleconnections, and what is known so far (or what isn't) about the Southern Hemisphere.

If you are an early-career researcher and would like to write a science story or share your views and experiences for The Early Pages, email your idea to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Climate instability in LIG

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Published: Friday, 12 October 2018 11:10

Considerable ambiguity remains over the extent and nature of millennial/centennial-scale climate instability during the Last Interglacial (LIG; 129-116,000 years ago).

In a new paper released in Nature Communications today, members of the PAGES Working Group on Quaternary Interglacials (QUIGS) find that the Last Interglacial was punctuated by a series of century-scale arid events in southern Europe and cold water-mass expansions in the North Atlantic.

The data also show that the amplitude of the Last Interglacial changes was greater than that of the Holocene. Greenland ice-melt and runoff as a result of excess high-latitude warming may have contributed to the weakening of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation and to the observed climate changes.

Lead author Chronis Tzedakis said that "although not a strict analogue for future anthropogenically-driven changes, the profile of the Last Interglacial that emerges is one of enhanced century-scale climate instability, with implications for ice-sheet and ocean dynamics."

Read more in the paper "Enhanced climate instability in the North Atlantic and southern Europe during the Last Interglacial", here.

Find out more about the QUIGS working group, and join the mailing list, here.

Ecosystem transitions & records

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Published: Thursday, 11 October 2018 16:56

A new paper from PAGES' Aquatic Transitions working group questions if we can detect ecosystem critical transitions and signals of changing resilience from paleo-ecological records.

Zofia Taranu et al., summize in Ecosphere that paleo-ecological records represent a unique opportunity to expand our temporal perspective to consider regime shifts and critical transitions.

The authors developed a protocol to simulate paleolimnological records undergoing regime shifts or critical transitions to alternate states and tested, using both simulated and real core records, how mixing and compression affected their ability to detect past abrupt shifts.

Access the paper here.

Read more about Aquatic Transitions here.

Scientist & EMPP collaboration

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Published: Thursday, 11 October 2018 16:36

A workshop report from PAGES' Global Paleofire Working Group 2 (GPWG2), published today in Open Quaternary, calls for input on collaborations between scientists and ecosystem managers, practitioners and policymakers (EMPPs).

"Taking Fire Science and Practice to the Next Level", by Katarzyna Marcisz et al., is a product of the 2017 GPWG2 workshop in Montreal, Canada.

With this report, GPWG2 members would like to open a discussion about how to ignite new collaborations with EMPPs and make paleofire data useful for fire risk management. They indicate the way to improve the communication between scientists and EMPPs by proposing a scheme of cooperation between both groups.

Access the paper here.

Learn more about GPWG2 here.