On Tuesday, May 21, Gianluca Mariño, distinguished researcher of the Marine and Environmental Geology Group of CIM-UVigo and Honorary Professor at “The Australian National University”, will present, within the Café con Sal lecture series, the talk “The nature of (palaeo) climate change”, in which he will explain the main characteristics of ice age cycles, the characterization of the variability pattern and its causes, as well as some considerations for exploiting the paleoclimate record in climate sensitivity studies.
During the last million years, Earth’s climate has repeatedly fluctuated between glacial periods and warm interglacial ages with a periodicity of approximately 100,000 years. These cycles, caused by changes in Earth’s orbit and overlapping climate feedbacks (for example, CO₂), involved a gradual global cooling and an accumulation of ice volume, followed by rapid warming and melting.
Gianluca Mariño uses geochemical, micropaleontological, and sedimentological tools, as well as probabilistic statistics, to quantitatively determine the timing, magnitude, and rates of past climate and oceanic change. Since joining the University of Vigo, where he became part of the faculty through the “Programa de Captación de Talento de Excelencia”, he has been working on several projects that use the paleoclimate record to understand how the climate system works and how it changes.
During the lecture, Gianluca will present the main characteristics of the “ciclos da idade de xeo”, highlighting the progress made in characterizing their variability pattern and understanding their causes. The speaker will focus on work developed by his research group that contributed to addressing two key aspects of the ice age narrative: the sequence of events that ends an ice age, and the processes that control CO₂ variations associated with these cycles. To conclude, he will present some theoretical considerations for exploiting the paleoclimate record to constrain climate sensitivity.
The lecture will take place at 11:00 AM in the ECIMAT Assembly Hall and will be broadcast live at http://tv.uvigo.es/es/directo/1.html, and will later be available on UVigoTV.
