David A. Hodell
- 2018
- Milutin Milankovic Medal
The 2018 Milutin Milankovic Medal is awarded to David A. Hodell for fundamental contributions to reconstructing and understanding past climate cycles and the causes of the mid-Pleistocene transition.
Division on Climate: Past, Present & Future
President: Didier Roche (cl@egu.eu)
Deputy President: Marc Luetscher (marc.luetscher@uibk.ac.at)
The Division on Climate: Past, Present & Future is one of the larger divisions of the European Geosciences Union. It pools from many disciplines and consequently has many co-organized and co-listed sessions with other divisions at the general assembly. The division is very interdisciplinary and covers climate variations on all time scales. CL includes the study of any kind of climate archive from rocks to ocean cores, speleothems, ice cores, chronicles, to instrumental records to name a few. Besides observations, climate modeling on all time scales from the deep past to the future are areas covered by the division. Any aspect of the climate system falls into the realm of the division e.g. atmosphere, ocean, biosphere, cryosphere, and geology. Themes focus on the climate on Earth but may also expand other planets or the sun.
Recent awardees
Hubertus Fischer
- 2018
- Hans Oeschger Medal
The 2018 Hans Oeschger Medal is awarded to Hubertus Fischer for his innovative development and use of analytical techniques to measure chemical compounds and gas concentrations and their isotopic compositions in polar ice cores.
Christo Buizert
- 2018
- Division Outstanding Early Career Scientists Award
The 2018 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientists Award is awarded to Christo Buizert for his innovative contributions on the bi-polar phasing of climate change from polar ice-core data using an exceptional combination of experimental and theoretical approaches.
Axel Timmermann
- 2017
- Milutin Milankovic Medal
The 2017 Milutin Milankovic Medal is awarded to Axel Timmermann for fundamental and pioneering contributions to the understanding of climate dynamics at different spatial and temporal scales.
Denis-Didier Rousseau
- 2017
- Hans Oeschger Medal
The 2017 Hans Oeschger Medal is awarded to Denis-Didier Rousseau in recognition of his pioneering work in continental climate reconstruction by developing new proxies and combining them with innovative climate-model simulations.
Francesco Muschitiello
- 2017
- Division Outstanding Early Career Scientists Award
The 2017 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientists Award is awarded to Francesco Muschitiello for his contributions to understanding mechanisms of abrupt climatic change in combination with observations across the North Atlantic region.
Annette Bösmeier
- 2017
- Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Awards
The 2017 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Awards is awarded to Annette Bösmeier Designing an expert knowledge based approach for the quantification of historical floods – the case study of the Kinzig catchment in Southwest Germany
Elizabeth Peneycad
- 2017
- Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Awards
The 2017 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Awards is awarded to Elizabeth Peneycad Coupling δ18O values of rodent tooth and mollusc shell carbonates: a new approach to reconstructing Pleistocene palaeotemperatures?
Janine Baijnath
- 2017
- Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Awards
The 2017 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Awards is awarded to Janine Baijnath Climatological Assessment of Spatiotemporal Trends in Observational Monthly Snowfall Totals and Extremes over the Canadian Great Lakes Basin
Johannes Winckler
- 2017
- Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Awards
The 2017 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Awards is awarded to Johannes Winckler The neglected nonlocal effects of deforestation
Katharina Höflich
- 2017
- Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Awards
The 2017 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Awards is awarded to Katharina Höflich Towards an improved mechanistic understanding of major saltwater inflows into the Baltic Sea
Latest posts from the CL blog
Pollen, more than forests’ story-tellers
- Climate: Past, Present & Future
- posted 2 weeks ago
Name of proxy Sporomorphs (pollen grains and fern spores) Type of record Biostratigraphy and Geochronology markers, Vegetation dynamics Paleoenvironment Terrestrial environment Period of time investigated Present to 360 million years How does it work? The sporomorphs (pollen grains and fern spores) are cells produced by plants involved in the reproduction. They are microscopic (less than a fifth of a millimeter) and contain a molecule called sporopollenin in their cell wall, which is very resistant to degradation. The sporopollenin molecule allows …
How to reconstruct past climates from water stable isotopes in Polar ice cores ?
- Climate: Past, Present & Future
- posted 1 month ago
Ice cores are a favored archive to study past climates, because they provide a number of indications on the history of the climate and of the atmospheric composition. Among these, water stable isotopes are considered as a very reliable temperature proxy. Yet, their interpretation is sometimes more complicated than a simple one-to-one correspondence with local temperature and requires intercomparison with other proxy records, as various processes affect the signal found in the ice cores. How does it work? All water …
Mountain glacier variations: natural thermometers and rainfall gauges
- Climate: Past, Present & Future
- posted 2 months ago
Name of proxy Fluctuations of mountain glaciers Type of record Geomorphological features Paleoenvironment Continent – High mountain areas Period of time investigated From historical periods (c.a. 300 years ago) to the end of the Pleistocene (up to 200 000 years back in time) How does it work? Mountain – or “alpine” – glaciers are small ice bodies (from 1 to 104 km2). Although they represent only 0.3% of the total volume of the present-day cryosphere, they contain a large amount …
Varves – Revealing the past layer by layer
- Climate: Past, Present & Future
- posted 3 months ago
Name of proxy Varved glacial lake sediments Type of record Sedimentological structures Paleoenvironment Ice marginal lake environments Period of time investigated Last Glacial Termination (LGT, c.21-14 thousands of years (ka)) to present times How do varves work? Proglacial lakes form in front of glaciers and act as sinks for water and sediment flowing from melting ice. Analyses of proglacial lake sediments enable continuous reconstructions of glacial and foreland environmental change, including annually resolved (varved) records. Varves typically consist of two …
Current issue of the EGU newsletter
With the EGU General Assembly just over a week away, we have a number of updates on the meeting, happening in Vienna from 8–13 April. Our conference organiser Copernicus has launched a great mobile app, and we recently announced a number of measures to reduce the environmental impact of the conference, from encouraging people to travel by train to introducing an option for participants to offset their carbon footprint. On the EGU blog, GeoLog, you can find posts about the city of Vienna, and a selection of Union-wide events, short courses and policy activities at the EGU General Assembly. For students taking part in the Outstanding Student Poster and PICO, there are also some tips from the judges on how to prepare a poster or PICO presentation.
This month, we have also announced that we are accepting nominations for EGU awards and medals. We encourage the EGU membership to consider gender, geographical and cultural balance when nominating outstanding Earth, planetary and space scientists at various career stages.
Last but not the least, we have also announced that we are launching two new publications at the 2018 General Assembly: a journal, Geoscience Communication, and a compilation, the Encyclopedia of Geosciences. Find these and many other EGU updates below.