Ice coring in Antarctica

Research: Palaeoclimatology

The science of reconstructing past climates has evolved rapidly over the past three decades. Having started as a sub-discipline of geology and geochemistry, it is today an interdisciplinary research field, which unifies a large international scientific community.

Some of the most innovative and surprising research in this field has important implications for future climate change. As such, paleoscience is today recognised as being of great relevance to societal concerns. For example, ice core analysis revealed that greenhouse gas levels are higher today than they have been for hundreds of thousands of years. In other words, anthropogenic impacts are pushing the climate system towards a state for which there is no "reference climate" in paleo records of the Quaternary. Therefore a better understanding of the climate system and feedbacks within the climate system is crucial for our future.

Another disconcerting finding of paleoresearch is the fact that the climate system is highly non-linear: in the past, rapid and large amplitude climate change has occurred in response to slowly varying, small amplitude forcing. It is critical that policy makers understand what paleoscience has to say about rapid climate change in order to fully understand the significance of future rapid climate change.

At the CCRC we have expertise in paleoclimate modeling, comparison of model results with paleoproxy data and the incorporation of paleoproxy data into climate models.

Click here for the Palaeoclimate Consortium.

CCRC academic staff currently active in this area of research

CCRC research staff currently active in this area of research

Latest news

Chinese Academy of Sciences visits CCRC
07 May 2012
A delegation from the Key Laboratory of Regional Climate-Environment Research For Temperate East Asia (RCE-TEA), Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Science recently visited the CCRC/CoECSS.

Willem's mystery interval study awarded CCRC prize
27 April 2012
Willem Huiskamp’s Honours research project on the “Mystery Interval” during the last deglaciation has won the 2011 Silicon Graphics Prize for Climate Research Using High Performance Computing.

Detailed study reveals workings of major oceanic pathway
16 April 2012
Researchers from the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC) and CSIRO have used a state-of-the-art ocean model to conduct the first detailed investigation of oceanic water flow between the Pacific and Indian Oceans via the south of Australia.

More news...

The Copenhagen Diagnosis

On 25th November 2009 members of The Climate Change Research Centre, as part of a group of 26 international climate scientists, were part of a major international release of a new report synthesizing the latest climate research to emerge since the last IPCC Assessment Report of 2007.

The Big Engine 2: oceans and weather

Federation Fellow and 2008 Eureka Prize winner, Professor Matthew England of CCRC, on the latest research into the role oceans play on weather.

The Science of Climate Change: Questions and Answers

Co-authored by Professor Steven Sherwood and Professor Matt England of CCRC, this new Academy of Science report aims to summarise and clarify the current understanding of the science of climate change for non-specialist readers.

The Big Engine 1: oceans and weather

Federation Fellow and 2008 Eureka Prize winner, Professor Matthew England of CCRC, on the latest research into the role oceans play on weather.

Share |