This week, over 100 scientists came together at Weetwood Hall here in Leeds to talk recent advancements and discoveries, but also to foster cross disciplinary engagement and greater collaboration between the palaeoclimate modelling, marine and terrestrial palaeodata communities. The invited speaker's s highlighted the major trends and discoveries from PlioMIP (Alan Haywood), the massive community compilation effort that has driven the PAGES working group PlioVar to a new marine synthesis of global marine palaeoclimate records for the Late Pliocene (Erin McClymont) and historical perspectives on sea surface temperature data-model comparisons (Harry Dowsett). We also had sessions on global reconstructions of hydroclimate and ice processes, regional reconstructions, ocean circulation and carbon dynamics.
I had the opportunity to present the initial results of my cloud reconstruction research. This opened some great discussions about what might be possible, especially from colleagues with very different expertise from my own. Could we use the leaf pigments to study past coud? How to cite: Fletcher, T., Tindall, J., and Haywood, A.: Palaeocloud for the Pliocene, The warm Pliocene: Bridging the geological data and modelling communities, Leeds, United Kingdom, 23–26 Aug 2022, GC10-Pliocene-59, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-gc10-pliocene-59, 2022. The meeting was sponsored by EGU, NERC UK Integrated Ocean Drilling Programme and PAGES. Thank you to the sponsors who made this meeting possible. Thank you also to the organising committee:
Dr Aisling Dolan (Co-Lead; University of Leeds ) Dr Heather Ford (Co-Lead; Queen Mary University of London ) Prof Alan Haywood (University of Leeds) Prof Erin McClymont (Durham University) Dr Babette Hoogakker (Herriot-Watt University) Dr Sze Ling Ho (National Taiwan University) Dr Bette Otto-Bliesner (NCAR) Dr Wing-Le Chan (University of Tokyo) Lauren Burton (PhD Candidate, University of Leeds) Lina C. Pérez-Angel (PhD Candidate, University of Colorado Boulder)
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It may be a small start, but none-the-less my birch babies are starting to grow here in the palaeolab at Leeds. With their first true leaves now emerging its time to take off the plastic wrap they have been under to germinate, and make sure they are soaking up the right light conditions for our study. Good luck little ones!
Later on in the project, we will be looking for volunteers to help count features of the images on the citizen science platform Zooniverse. Watch this space if you are interested in being part of the team to find a proxy for cloud in deep time - and help develop and test tools for other scientists along the way.
Left to right: Incandescent (back up chamber); full sun (direct light), cloud (20% of sun and dispersed), and canopy shade (20% of sun, dispersed and shifted green).
The chambers are finally ready to grow. The lights are finally on in the Palaeolab! These custom build light fixtures, using Seoul Sunlike LEDs, will have filters added before going into the growth tents to mimic full sun, cloud and canopy shade light conditions for my plant growth experiments.
Thanks to the team up in Engineering for finishing the wiring and testing these for safety. Its definitely taken longer than expected to get in the components needed to build my plant growth chambers down in the PalaeoLab at Leeds. COVID continues to bring shortages in the most unexpected places, but it is coming along!
Things have been busy with the GeoChronR Hackathon, Utrecht/Leeds intergroup meeting, the UK Alan Turing Institute conference, and a course in how to build impact momentum.
Orders are coming in now for the components of the growth chamber set up I am building in the lab - though shortages are sometimes requiring redesign. I have been lucky to get to know colleagues in Geography, such as David Ashley, who has been generous with his time and technical advice. I also have a home for my tents in the Palaeolab thanks to Cris Little. You cannot raise a barn alone, or, as it turns out, grow tents with the weather within. The 5th workshop of the NECLIME working group on climate was once again online. This year it was organized by Andrea Kern and Thomas Kenji Akabane. The workshop had 37 participants including many young scientists - a potential benefit of the online format serving those without travel funds. The main purpose of the workshop was to discuss the potential and limitations of new methods for paleoclimate reconstructions for Quaternary and Neogene datasets on a global scale. A special focus of the meeting was new method that use probability density functions to detemine climate. Comparisons were made with the Coexistence Approach and non-plant proxy data . A second scientific focus lay on the impact on CO2 on plant-based palaeoclimate reconstructions and how this can be accessed through time. I contributed to the discussions with a synthesis and extension of the climate work conducted at Beaver Pond, on Ellesmere Island, over the last couple of decades. At this site, out many lines of evidence allow comparison of climate reconstructions based on wood isotopes, mollusck isotpes, beetle communities, macrofossil plant communities (both PDF and envelope methods), pollen and non-pollen palynomorphs, diatoms, and geochemical methods using bacterial membrane lipids. Fletcher, T. 2022. A Beaver Pond frozen in time: Multi-proxy analysis in the Pliocene High Arctic. NECLIME workshop on climate. 21st–22nd February. A detailed report is available here and on the on the NECLIME website including preliminary considerations on the use of CRACLE and CREST for paleoclimate reconstructions, references, and links to useful R packages. I am excited to have found out today I have been granted an Alan Turing Postdoctoral Enrichment Award. These funds will go towards developing and testing an automated method for identifying stomata and epidermal cells in microscope images of leaves, facilitating fast data collection of cell morphometrics. My aim is to identify multi-character changes in the micromorphology of leaves in response to changes in light that mimic cloud, sun and shade.
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ProjectClouds cause the greatest uncertainty in climate models, but we currently have no way of testing cloud model performance in a climate with higher CO2 than the historical records. Palaeontology gives us access to such a past, but currently, we don't have a method to reconstruct cloud in deep time. Archives
June 2023
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