The climate of the Earth follows a complex interplay of cause-and-effect chains. A change in precipitation at one location may be caused by changes on the other side of the planet. A better understanding of these “teleconnections” – the linkages between remote places – may help to better understand local impacts of future climate change. A look into the climate of the past helps to investigate the teleconnections. An international team of Japanese, British, Australian, and German scientists, with the participation of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, now investigated Japanese lake sediments to decipher the interplay between local climate changes on the northern hemisphere about 12.000 years ago. Their results, now published as Nature Scientific Report, show that a regional warming in Europe caused a cooling and an increase in snowfall in East Asia.
The climate of the Earth follows a complex interplay of cause-and-effect chains. A change in precipitation at one location may be caused by changes on the other side of the planet. A better understanding of these “teleconnections” – the linkages between remote places – may help to better understand local impacts of future climate change. A look into the climate of the past helps to investigate the teleconnections. An international team of Japanese, British, Australian, and German scientists, with the participation of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, now investigated Japanese lake sediments to decipher the interplay between local climate changes on the northern hemisphere about 12.000 years ago. Their results, now published as Nature Scientific Report, show that a regional warming in Europe caused a cooling and an increase in snowfall in East Asia.
The Younger Dryas was a cold period of about one thousand and two hundred years at the end of the last glacial phase, and occurred about 12,800 to 11,600 years ago. While the world had already turned towards a warmer climate, there was an abrupt backlash to a much colder conditions. The average global temperature fell by three to four degrees within only a few decades. Why? This is still unclear. The team around the former GFZ PhD student of the GFZ section Climate Dynamics and Landscape Evolution, Gordon Schlolaut (now Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology), investigated sediments from Lake Suigetsu in Japan, to reconstruct East Asian climate change during the Younger Dryas. The scientists were able to show that the cold period was divided into two different phases showingopposing climate trends than in Europe which the scientists explain by teleconnections.
Achim Brauer, Head of the GFZ section Climate Dynamics and Landscape Evolution and Director of the Department Geoarchives says “Little by little we come to understand the interplay between regional climate changes at the end of the last glacial phase. This brings us closer to our ultimate aim of anticipating regional impacts of future global climate change”.
Continue reading at GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences
Photo: Sediment sampling on Lake Suigetsu, Japan (Credits: A. Brauer, GFZ).
