By studying past climate dynamics, researchers in the Department of Geography are contributing to debates over the driving mechanisms and spatial complexity of climate change, including climate change impacts on global environments and human populations. Understanding the pacing and propagation of past climate change, through geochronological approaches, is central to our research. The Department is home to state-of-the-art tephrochronology and dendrochronology research laboratories, with active research projects investigating past climate and environmental dynamics all over the world.
Research projects
Research projects currently being undertaken on this theme include:
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Dendrochronology softwareWe provide here links to some of the most commonly used programs in Dendrochronology. For over 30 years, these programs have served the Dendrochronological community by providing the needed tools to produce and analyse tree-ring data. |
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Improving Late Glacial European tree-ring chronologies for accurate climate archive dating – Consolidation and extension of the Swiss-German pine chronology back to 14,000 BPAnnually resolved and absolutely dated tree-ring chronologies are important paleo-environmental proxy archives, because they can cover several thousands of years and robust master chronologies are available for many different regions around the globe. Moreover, the unique dating accuracy has a strong impact on many fields of application, including paleoclimatology and paleoecology, but also archaeology and radiocarbon dating. Here, we strive to a) consolidate and b) extend the worldwide longest continuous tree-ring width chronology from Hohenheim/Zurich, which currently reaches back to 12,500 before present (BP). |
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2000 years of Paleoclimatology and -ecology from oak stable isotopes in the Czech Republic - the PALEO projectAnnually resolved and absolutely dated chronologies of tree-ring width and maximum latewood density represent the backbone of high-resolution paleoclimatology and -ecology. Previous studies focused on the reconstruction of summer temperature variability over the past several hundred to thousand years. Extending our paleo-perspective over the entire Common Era (CE), and improving our understanding of ecosystem and societal most relevant hydroclimatic fluctuations, is a timely need to support and even validate model simulations, and constrain the uncertainty of future climate predictions. Joining forces toward the aggregation of composite tree-ring chronologies, exploration of additional tree-ring parameters, and application of novel reconstruction methods, are of upmost international importance. |
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Testing the 'megadrought' hypothesis: the timing, cause and impacts of climate change in equatorial AfricaResearch into the timing, cause and impacts of tropical megadrought events recorded in the sediments of East African Lake Challa, a 90 m deep crater lake on the flank of Kilimanjaro. Lake Challa contains an exceptional sedimentary record, with the proven potential to reconstruct past hydroclimate at high chronological precision and with dating accuracy not previously achieved in the tropics. |
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Extra-terrestrial evaluation of global-scale tree-ring dating in the first millennium CETree ring-based temperature reconstructions, representing the backbone of high-resolution palaeoclimatology, provide useful long-term perspectives on climate change. To objectively investigate the so-called 'missing ring' hypothesis, the COSMIC initiative will, for the first time ever, compile a global collection of wood samples from around 35 millennial-long tree-ring chronologies that comprise different material from living trees as well as historical timbers from roof and wall structures in old buildings and subfossil remains preserved in peat bogs, mires, lakes and glacial moraines. |