NESSC_High Resolution Organic Geochemical Records (WP2)
This is part of Work Package 2 of NESSC (Netherlands Earth System Science Centre)
Ice cores supply detailed information about the earth over the past 800 thousand years, such as Antarctic air temperatures and the atmosphere's composition. Yet, for information about the past climate of millions of years ago, we depend on the fossilized remains of organisms that have been preserved deep in the earth. Those remnants are called proxies.
Proxies in plankton fossils
A well-developed proxy can give us a lot of information about the climate conditions in the past. Thus, with the ratio of magnesium and calcium in the calcified skeletons of plankton fossils, we can accurately calculate the sea surface temperature to 1.5 ° C. However, the accuracy may sometimes suffer from other factors such as salinity or magnesium-calcium ratios in the sea. In addition, there are no proxies for many important climate variables.
The seawater temperature accuracy of the past million years is 2 to 3 ° C, and 3 to 5 ° C for the past hundred million years. Our ambition is to reconstruct seawater temperatures with a precision of less than 1 ° C for the past million years, and less than 2 ° C for the past hundred million years.
Thus, the need to improve proxies and reduce uncertainties only goes on.
Meet the team
Linked projects
NESSC-WP2_High-resolution organic geochemical proxy records of critical time intervals I
Supervisor
Jaap Sinninghe Damsté
Funder
Ministerie van OCW
Project duration
11 Jul 2015 - 5 Mar 2022
Linked publications
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2017
Frieling, J.; Gebhardt, H.; Huber, M.; Adekeye, O.A.; Akande, S.O.; Reichart, G.-J.; Middelburg, J.J.; Schouten, S.; Sluijs, A. (2017). Extreme warmth and heat-stressed plankton in the tropics during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Science Advances 3(3): e1600891. https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1600891Loomis, S.E.; Russell, J.M.; Verschuren, D.; Morrill, C.; De Cort, G.; Sinninghe Damsté, J.S.; Olago, D.; Eggermont, H.; Street-Perrott, F.A.; Kelly, M.A. (2017). The tropical lapse rate steepened during the Last Glacial Maximum. Science Advances 3(1): e1600815. https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1600815O'Brien, C.L.; Robinson, S.A.; Pancost, R.D.; Sinninghe Damsté, J.S.; Schouten, S.; Lunt, D.J.; Alsenz, H.; Bornemann, A.; Bottini, C.; Brassell, S.C.; Farnsworth, A.; Forster, A.; Huber, B.T.; Inglis, G.N.; Jenkyns, H.C.; Linnert, C.; Littler, K.; Markwick, P.; McAnena, A.; Mutterlose, J.; Naafs, B.D.A.; Püttmann, W.; Sluijs, A.; van Helmond, N.A.G.M.; Vellekoop, J.; Wagner, T.; Wrobel, N.E. (2017). Cretaceous sea-surface temperature evolution: Constraints from TEX86 and planktonic foraminiferal oxygen isotopes. Earth-Sci. Rev. 172: 224-247. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2017.07.012Rush, D.; Sinninghe Damsté, J.S. (2017). Lipids as paleomarkers to constrain the marine nitrogen cycle. Environ. Microbiol. 19(6): 2119–2132,. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1462-2920.13682
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2016
Johnson, T.C.; Werne, J.P.; Brown, E.T.; Abbott, A.; Berke, M.; Steinman, B.E.; Halbur, J.; Contreras, S.; Grosshuesch, S.; Deino, A.; Lyons, R.P.; Scholz, C.A.; Schouten, S.; Sinninghe Damsté, J.S. (2016). A progressively wetter climate in southern East Africa over the past 1.3 million years. Nature (Lond.) 537(7619): 220-224. dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature19065
