Session abstracts > Session 3

Session 3: Reconstruction of palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironments during the last glacial period: impact and implications of millennial-scale climate variations 

Charlotte Prud’homme¹, Amaelle Landais², Pierre-Henri Blard³ and Olivier Bignon-Lau⁴

In a context of climate instability, defining the response of terrestrial ecosystems to climate change is a key issue for the future of our societies. The focus of this session will be on the last glacial period from 115 000 to 12,000 years (115-12 ka). The climate of this period has been intensively documented hence providing a framework for the dispersal of modern humans throughout the world and into Europe. The climate of this period is characterized by numerous short-lived, millennial-scale variations and corresponding landscape and ecological changes. These short-lived climate fluctuations are well recorded in different archives: ice and marine cores and, to a lesser extent, in terrestrial environments (e.g. speleothems, lake and river sediments, peatlands, alpine glacier fluctuations, vertebrate and invertebrate remains, and loess-palaeosol sequences). Despite this sum of information, our understanding of the influence of millennial climate variations on the environments and on human societies is limited by a lack of continental data and of precise chronological constraints. Moreover, it is essential to understand the palaeoclimate of the last glacial period in order to set up and test the numerical models, which simulate future climate scenarios.

The present session aims to:

-       interrogate the synchronicity of the different records (glacial, terrestrial and marine archives) and highlight the importance of geochronology;

-       discuss the different approaches to quantify climate parameters, with a special focus on proxy transfer functions and inverse modelling methods;

-       evaluate the consequences of environmental variability on the composition of the mega-fauna and its ecological and climatological significations and; 

-       investigate the impact of the abrupt climate changes on human socio-economical strategies and the relation with their environment.

 By bringing together different communities working on reconstructing past climate and environment from data and models, we will improve our understanding of climate evolution and provide context for important human behavioural changes.

1 - Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics, Université de Lausanne

2 - LSCE, CNRS-CEA, Gif sur Yvette

3 - CRPG, CNRS Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy

4 - ArScAn Ethnologie préhistorique, CNRS, Nanterre