Fachbereich Geowissenschaften

Under sustained global warming, Arctic climate is projected to become more responsive to changes in North Pacific meridional heat transport as a result of teleconnections between low and high latitudes, but the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood.

Late Miocene climate evolution provides an opportunity to assess Earth’s climate sensitivity to carbon cycle perturbation under warmer-than-modern conditions. Despite its relevance for understanding the climate system, the driving mechanisms underlying profound climate and carbon cycle changes – including the enigmatic Late Miocene cooling from 7 to 5.4 million years ago – remain unclear.

North Pacific dust flux and modelling results provide new evidence for long-term land-atmosphere-ocean interactions associated with the onset and intensification of the Northern Hemisphere Glaciation.

Tipping points in the climate system can be the result of a slow but linear development. However, they can also be accompanied by a “flickering", with two stable climatic states that alternate before a final transition occurs – and the climate tips permanently.

Human activities impose significant changes on sedimentation processes and vegetation cover within lake catchments. However, the needed time for an anthropogenically disturbed natural state to be reversed back to its natural state by environmental protection programs is still ambiguous.

There is growing concern on the survival of Mediterranean forests under the projected near-future droughts as a result of anthropogenic climate change.

Our results identify the prime driver of climate variation in Africa’s low latitudes over the past 620 ky—the key time frame for the evolution of our species. Warming and cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean paced by insolation changes modulated the tropical Walker circulation, driving opposing wet–dry states in eastern and western Africa.

Understanding the dynamics between the East Asian summer (EASM) and winter monsoon (EAWM) is needed to predict their variability under future global warming scenarios.

The growth of coral reefs is threatened by the dual stressors of ocean warming and acidification. Despite a wealth of studies assessing the impacts of climate change on individual taxa, projections of their impacts on coral reef net carbonate production are limited.

The evolution of industrial-era warming across the continents and oceans provides a context for future climate change and is important for determining climate sensitivity and the processes that control regional warming. Here we use post-ad 1500 palaeoclimate records to show that sustained industrial-era warming of the tropical oceans first developed during the mid-nineteenth century and was nearly synchronous with Northern Hemisphere continental warming.

Human activity is leaving a pervasive and persistent signature on Earth. Vigorous debate continues about whether this warrants recognition as a new geologic time unit known as the Anthropocene.