Palaeoclimate science for a better understanding of Earth system dynamics

Expected outcome

Project results are expected to contribute to some of the following outcomes:

• Better process understanding of past climate changes at different time scales, their variability and interactions with ecosystems, leading to improved Earth system models;
• Future climate change scenarios produced in light of past changes in the Earth system, in particular warm climates/high sea-level situations, and abrupt transitions;
• Identification of thresholds in Earth system components and better characterisation of driving mechanisms and feedbacks that may be responsible for non-linear behaviours, including indicators of abrupt changes, and early warning signals within palaeoclimate records;
• Synthesis of climate variations that can serve as fundamental basis for IPCC assessments and benchmarks for model inter-comparisons.

Scope

Palaeoclimatic (including geological, biological and ice-core) records provide information on the long-term evolution of the climate, as well as the conditions and processes that can drive physical and ecological systems during warm and cold periods, deglaciations and abrupt climatic events. The challenge of the research under this topic is to provide robust information on palaeoclimate states and events outside the range of variability recorded over the past centuries that can serve as guide for the development of Earth system models.

This challenge will be tackled through some of the following activities:

• Producing and aggregating in databases high-resolution, well-dated, interoperable palaeoclimatic records on climate variability in terms of amplitude, time (onset, duration, frequency) and space (location, extension), extending the instrumental time series to improve our understating of the proxy records and the quantification of their uncertainties;
• Development of Earth system models with outputs that allow a more direct comparison to palaeo data, modelling climate variability, thresholds, and impacts across timescales from years to millennia;
• Describing short- to long-term climate evolution and the natural climate variability using quantitative reconstructions from different proxies of past climate periods;
• Identification of climate-related (including ecological) tipping points and their consequences using palaeo data and model experiments.
• Allowing for consistent integration of large-scale and more regional/local factors to be reproduced by climate models using natural forcings.

Projects should rely on palaeoclimatic data from scientific drilling or coring campaigns, sediment records, dendrochronological and other appropriate sources.

Projects funded under this topic are strongly encouraged to collaborate and envisage clustering activities together and with other relevant projects in and outside of Horizon Europe.