30 novembre : Séminaire de Emilie Capron

Back to the future? Climate clues from past interglacials.

Emilie Capron, Institut des Géosciences de l’Environnement, Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, IRD, Grenoble-INP

Jeudi 30 novembre, 14h30, salle Léo Pastouret (Ifremer)

The anthropogenic-induced high-latitude warming has global climatic implications due to polar ice mass loss, sea level rise and ocean circulation changes. To evaluate the risk of major current and future environmental changes, it is essential to explore climate dynamics and associated cryosphere and carbon cycle feedbacks that occurred during past warm time intervals.

• First, I would like to illustrate through this talk that past interglacials of the Quaternary are of particular interest in this context. They provide a basis for comparison with our current interglacial. Also, interglacials of the past 450 ka exhibit a polar warming comparable to that projected by 2100 due to specific combinations of orbital and CO₂ forcing.
• Second, I will use as a case-study the last interglacial (~129-116 thousand of years), a warm interval characterized by a global sea level 6-9 m higher than today. I will present the advances in characterizing the state of polar ice sheets as well as global and regional climate variations during this warm interval combining climate data syntheses from natural archives and outputs from state-of-the-art climate models. The results provide an improved understanding of the mechanisms and feedbacks occurring during this warmer-than-preindustrial period.