Working from their respective institutions, Drs Louis François, Torsten Utescher and Angela Bruch are committed to shedding light on prehistoric climate change. Here, they offer an insight into their vast collaboration and the progress they have made in achieving their collective goals

Can you give an introduction to Neogene Climate Evolution in Eurasia (NECLIME)? How did the project emerge and what is the key goal?

NECLIME was founded in 1999 – an initiative of Russian, Chinese, Armenian and German palaeobotanists whose vision was to reconstruct the Neogene climate and vegetation on a continental scale by developing and using timely quantitative techniques and multidisciplinary approaches. Success in such a venture requires close cooperation between scientists from across Eurasia. Moreover, the application of standardised techniques is crucial for obtaining homogenous datasets which can be used to answer various questions – for example, regarding the evolution of biodiversity in the context of past climate change under changing palaeogeographic patterns. Moreover, all single fossil sites studied have to be placed in a sound stratigraphical framework, allowing correlation over large distances.

Dr François, where did your personal interest in climate evolution stem from?

My personal contribution to NECLIME is to use palaeoclimate model reconstructions to simulate past vegetation, and to compare this modelled vegetation with past vegetation observed at localities where data are available. My previous research has mostly been devoted to the carbon cycle and biogeochemical processes, with the ultimate objective of understanding (and modelling) how CO2 and other greenhouse gases may increase in the future, and also how these gases have been changing in the past in the absence of

anthropogenic pressure. In this framework, along with colleagues I developed a model of the land carbon cycle, which corresponds with the transfer of carbon through vegetation and soils. I then became progressively interested in the response of vegetation to climate change (including past climate changes). Consequently, the focus of my modelling moved to the vegetation itself, rather than solely CO2 fluxes. I then reconstructed past vegetation for different periods, such as the Last Glacial Maximum 21,000 years ago. Finally, I performed reconstructions of vegetation for older periods (several million years). Naturally, vegetation evolution is strongly connected to climate evolution and they are linked by many feedback processes. In 2001, I was invited to a NECLIME workshop in Prague. Having found that NECLIME was a great opportunity for me to validate my model reconstructions of past vegetation, I began to work closely with them.

How do you analyse interactions between changes in vegetation, fauna, palaeogeography and climate systems? Have you developed any novel mechanisms to assist in this analysis?

During the past decade of NECLIME activities, new approaches and methods have emerged to determine specific environmental features, using plants and animals as proxies for quantitative reconstructions of climate and vegetation parameters. In parallel, computer simulations with climate and vegetation models provide more and more detailed and complex reconstructions that can be compared with the available data in order to evaluate our ability to model past climate evolution and identify holes

in our understanding of the functioning of the climate system. Multi-proxy and proxy-model comparisons are crucial tools, not only for data validation, but especially to understand the interactions between climate, flora and fauna.

With NECLIME’s annual meeting scheduled to take place in Russia in October of this year, what are some of the key topics on the agenda and the expected key output?

The 14th NECLIME Annual Meeting in Saint Petersburg will focus on palaeoclimate and vegetation of Northern Eurasia, palaeovegetation and climate evolution of the high latitudes, in Central Asia (especially Kazakhstan) and in Eastern Eurasia, with a particular focus on Primorje and northern China. Moreover, the quantification of the Neogene climate evolution, including the Plio/Pleistocene transition will be addressed. Apart from more detailed insight into the climate and vegetation evolution in the specified key areas (including monsoon dynamics in the eastern key region) we intend to intensify our contacts with Russian researchers, and hope for even more joint projects in the future.

Can you reveal your plans in terms of the continued progression of NECLIME as well as the possible future trajectory of your research regarding potential new projects?

The Plio/Pleistocene transition from warm Neogene climate into the modern icehouse world is one of the key topics of future NECLIME research. The increasing relevance of orbitally driven climate cycles and the spatial differentiation of the terrestrial climatic response on those global climate changes cause regionally different effects on vegetation and environments. Understanding these relationships is also crucial for understanding modern and future climate. Moreover, studying such environmental changes at the time of the emergence of early humans will also provide decisive clues for hominid evolution, behaviour and mode of living.

Neogenius at work

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The climate consortiumA consortium of scientists from all over the world has been working on a project to

build a clear picture of climate change in the Neogene period. Having been underway for 14 years now, NECLIME is of epic proportions and has already yielded some

interesting discoveries, with increasingly ambitious future plans

THE TIME INTERVAL known as the Phanerozoic, from the Ancient Greek for ‘visible life’, stretches from the worldwide radiation of multicellular organisms (called the Cambrian explosion) to the development of human societies, and is divided into three eras: the Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic, meaning ancient, middle and new life, respectively. Most phyla evolved during the Palaeozoic, and of course the Mesozoic is often characterised as the age of the dinosaurs – but what of the Cenozoic? This period has sometimes been described as the ‘age of mammals’, but could also fairly be called the ‘age of birds’ since the disappearance of dinosaurs also left room for birds, along with many other species, to diversify.

During the Cenozoic, mammals evolved to fill many evolutionary niches – from diminutive rodents to large land grazers. Many shapes, such as the prehistoric horse Miohippus, would ultimately give rise to the animals we know today; far more would be lost in the annals of prehistory, strange beasts unlike any we know today, and effectively evolutionary dead-ends. When imagining the world during the Cenozoic era, then, one must surely picture an environment that is very different from our own. But that is not entirely accurate; during this geological era, the continents assumed the positions that we are now familiar with, and the Cenozoic period saw the beginning of an unstoppable rise that continues today: that of man.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CLIMATE

There is one other important similarity between the Cenozoic and today’s world that could prove to be of use to modern science: climate. The Cenozoic saw a great deal of climate fluctuation, as well as changes in the levels of greenhouse gases present in the

atmosphere. Although many of these changes are useful primarily as prehistorical markers, certain slices of the time period are statistically relevant to our own climate. Clearly, this state of affairs warrants further investigation into the palaeoclimate – and one endeavour that seeks to do exactly that is the Neogene Climate Evolution in Eurasia (NECLIME) project.

NECLIME focuses on climate evolution in Eurasia during the Neogene period, the second of the Cenozoic era’s three periods, preceded by the longer Palaeogene period. The Neogene accounts for around 20 million years of the Cenozoic, and occurs about 40 million years after the notorious Cretacious-Palaeogene extinction event that saw the end of the dinosaurs, as well as the Mesozoic era. During this time period, the continents arrived at the positions that we see them in today, and the ancestors of man (the hominids) appeared in Africa; in geological time, the Neogene is the ‘previous’ period – the consecutive Quaternary period began around 2.6 million years ago and is Earth’s current geological period.

QUITE A PROJECT

Understanding climate evolution in detail over a 20 million year period is a task every bit as huge as it sounds. Now in its 14th year, NECLIME counts over 100 contributors from nearly 40 separate countries, with expertise in fields as diverse as palaeobotany, palaeontology, climatology, limnology, geology and geodynamics. Of course, palaeoclimates cannot be studied directly, because they leave no traces of themselves in the fossil bank; so researchers work by way of proxies – coeval flora and fauna that show physiological signs of the climate they lived in. Palaeoclimatology is therefore inherently reliant on cross-disciplinary collaboration of the sort facilitated by NECLIME.

Atmospheric and biospheric modelling are integral areas of the project’s work. Although Neogene proxy data in Eurasia is generally quite plentiful and exists in a number of sites, large gaps in the fossil record are still apparent. These can only be explored using sophisticated modelling. NECLIME’s activities ensure that current climate models are constantly evaluated against the fossil record, allowing its researchers to improve both our knowledge of palaeoclimatology and the accuracy of our modelling systems. Several of the working groups involved in the project are also focusing on more specific topics such as high resolution climate records, taxonomy and fossil wood, in order to intensify cooperation between colleagues working in the same field and to make the latest basic research available to the entire network.

The collaborative aspect of the project is already vast and its achievements and data have been made publicly available for further study. The sum total of NECLIME’s findings is available on the NECLIME website and under the keyword ‘NECLIME’ in PANGAEA – a public data library and information system that aims to publish, distribute and archive geocoded data.

LEADING QUESTIONS

The project primarily calls for the time-consuming process of comparative data analysis and modelling, advancing our understanding in a gradual manner, but NECLIME has already raised many immediate issues. For example, global cooling in the Neogene led to a temperature difference between the Equator and the Poles significantly larger today compared to earlier periods; in other words, the temperature at the Poles has been decreasing faster than anywhere else. This counterintuitive state

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NECLIME

CHANGES IN CONTINENTAL CLIMATE, VEGETATION, AND WEATHERING DURING THE CENOZOIC COOLING AS DERIVED FROM PROXY-DATA

OBJECTIVES

To reconstruct Neogene climate and vegetation at a continental scale by using /developing timely quantitative techniques and multidisciplinary approaches.

KEY COLLABORATORS

Professor Dr Volker Mosbrugger, Senckenberg Research Institute, Frankfurt/Main, Germany; Dr Alexandra-Jane Henrot, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium; Professor Dr Gerrit Lohmann, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany; Dr Martin Butzin, MARUM, Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, University of Bremen, Germany; Dr Mario Krapp, Potsdam-Institut für Klimafolgenforschung, Germany

Visit www.neclime.de for a full list of NECLIME project members

FUNDING

Understanding Cenozoic Climate Cooling, DFG • Senckenberg Research Institute, Frankfurt / Main, Germany • Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique, Brussels, Belgium (under contract FRFC 2.4571.10) • German Science Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) • Other national science foundations

CONTACT

Professor Louis François

Institut d’Astrophysique et de Géophysique Université de Liège, Bat. B5c 17 Allée du Six Aout B-4000 Liege, Belgium

T +32 4 366 97 76 E louis.francois@ulg.ac.be

Dr Torsten Utescher

T +49 228 73 97 73 E utescher@geo.uni-bonn.de

PD Dr Angela A Bruch

T +49 69 7542 1568 E angela.bruch@senckenberg.de

DR LOUIS FRANÇOIS is Professor at the University of Liège in Belgium. His research expertise concerns carbon cycle and ecosystem modelling, in relation to palaeoclimate reconstruction and future climate change.

DR TORSTEN UTESCHER is a trained geologist working at Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt am Main, and the Steinmann Institute, University of Bonn, Germany.

DR ANGELA A BRUCH is a palaeobotanist at the ROCEEH research centre of Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities at Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Coldest month mean temperature (CMT) anomalies (°C) in Eurasia during the Middle Miocene (approximately 15 million years ago) with respect to present-day conditions, reconstructed from site paleodata gathered by the NECLIME group (top) and from a simulation (Henrot et al., 2010) of the Planet Simulator climate model (bottom). For consistency between both figures, present-day continents rather than paleo continents are drawn.

A-J Henrot, L François, E Favre, M Butzin, M Ouberdous, G Munhoven, 2010, Effects of CO2, continental distribution, topography and vegetation changes on the climate at the Middle Miocene: a model study, Clim. Past, 6, 675-694

of affairs can be partly explained by the fact that the ice caps reflect solar radiation (and therefore the development of ice caps accelerates the cooling process). However, most sophisticated climate models largely underestimate this high latitude Neogene cooling, and thus a full explanation is yet to be discovered. The problem in itself is important, because it flags up a potential issue for the future of our climate, since it may imply that the warming in the mid and high latitudes will be much higher than predicted by the models.

The objective of NECLIME is not to make projections of the future of climate change; the project simply aims to give a more complete understanding of the past, and to learn from it. However, NECLIME‘s progress is closely interlinked with climate modelling that may be useful in making projections of the future. Not only are sections of the Neogene strongly similar to the present day in terms of continental layout, climate and oceanic circulation, but the project actually uses the same models that are used in future projections. NECLIME therefore contributes to the efficacy of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, which will be presented in the upcoming report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

THE FUTURE OF OUR PLANET’S PAST

There is no doubt that NECLIME is a vast project, ambitious in terms of temporal and geographical scope, but its achievements within its 14-year lifespan are already compelling. Over the next seven years, the project will focus on Central and East Asia, producing data to fill gaps in PANGAEA’s current catalogue, as well as the continued reconstruction of Neogene climates and biomes to improve modern science’s understanding of the period. It may perhaps even aid in discovering the answers to some of the most fundamental questions about our own evolution and the behaviour of early hominids.

Although the primary goal of the NECLIME project lies with fundamental research, paleaeoclimate data could be of great value in modelling future weather patterns – and will also help to improve the accuracy of the models that we already have. Edmund Burke once said that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. If the same is true for prehistory, then the NECLIME project may yet save us all from a catastrophe that could be climactic as well as climatic.

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INTELLIGENCE