PAGES United Kingdom

uk funded key projects

The UK source of funding for palaeoclimatic research in the largely from the Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC). The two largest NERC-funded projects are Rapid Climate Change programme (RAPID) and QUEST.


RAPID

Rapid Climate Change

Rapid Climate Change (RAPID) is a £20 million, six-year (2001-2008) programme of the Natural Environment Research Council.  The programme aims to investigate and understand the causes of rapid climate change, with a main (but not exclusive) focus on the role of the Atlantic Ocean thermohaline circulation (THC). Using a novel combination of present day observations, palaeo-data and a hierarchy of models (from local process models to global general circulation models) the programme will improve our understanding of the roles of the THC and other processes in rapid climate change, and of the global and regional impacts of such change.


QUEST

Quantifying and Understanding the Earth System

The purpose of QUEST's £21m programme is to deliver a step-change improvement in scientists' ability to understand environmental change as part of the complex interactions between the natural Earth ystem and human actions.  QUEST will assess the implications of global environmental change for the sustainable use of resources, seek action-oriented research outputs, and inform decision-making.  A better qualitative and quantitative understanding of the Earth system is necessary, especially the interactions among the atmosphere, oceans, land and human activities. QUEST is highly interdisciplinary, building on existing expertise in the UK and abroad, integrating natural and social sciences, and maintaining a dialogue with UK government department.  Its results are also relevant to international policy making, industry and society.


CACHE

Climate and Chemistry: forcings, feedbacks and phasings in the Earth System (CACHE)

The British Antarctic Survey has a programme looking at past climate through ice cores, marine and lake sediments.
The work is mainly split into two projects, one focussed on the Antarctic Peninsula and the Holocene,  the other on the late Quaternary as seen through ice cores
Among other projects, BAS has been the UK partner in the EPICA project


THE TANA PROJECT

Palaeoenvironmental Reconstruction of Lake Tana - the source of the Blue Nile

This NERC-funded Tana Project aims to investigate the age and history of Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile, one of the world's great rivers. New geophysical and core data show that the lake may be at least 40,000 years old and also show that the lake dried out at around 16,000 years ago, and almost certainly at apparently regular intervals during the later stages of the last Ice Age.  It is possible that the lake dried because of intense droughts lasting one or two hundred years, and that the droughts were caused by disruption of Africa's monsoon climate when iceberg-laden meltwater from North America flooded the North Atlantic - the Heinrich events.  The Palaeo Tana Project aims to test these hypotheses using high resolution scanning of a core using X-ray fluorescence, X-ray  and colour imagery, geophysical and magnetic core-scanning technology. The resulting datasets will be interpreted by comparison to sediments of the known drying-out event at 16,000 years ago. Dating the sediments by appropriate methods including luminescence, tephrochronology, and Argon-Argon dating will allow precise estimates of the timing and duration of the drought events.


CLIMATE CHANGE IN MEXICO

The Mexican Climate Change Network is funded by the Leverhulme Trust (Collaborative Academic Network Grants) and its intention is to draw together international expertise in Climate Change with a focus on Mexico. The aim of the network is to foster dialogue between individuals working on Mexican climate change and to draw on internationally recognised expertise in dendroclimatology, palaeolimnology, climate history and modern climatology, with the following objectives: to improve understanding of the climatic mechanisms that cause drought across Mexico and how these vary spatially; to identify past, present and future impacts of, and responses to, drought in Mexico; to develop a more comprehensive understanding of climate change and its impacts across Mexico on a range of time scales. The intention of the network is to facilitate the integration and development of research at the forefront of climate change studies, to develop a greater appreciation of climate change in Mexico on a range of time scales and to establish a research agenda and an academic interchange, enabling future collaborative research in this field.


UK Surface Ocean-Lower Atmosphere Study

The UK Surface Ocean-Lower Atmosphere Study (UK SOLAS) is a NERC directed programme which aims to advance understanding of environmentally significant interactions between the atmosphere and ocean, focusing on material exchanges that involve ocean productivity, atmospheric composition and climate. UK SOLAS is a component of the UK IGBP effort and provides the main national science contribution to the international SOLAS initiative with a similar research goal.


The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project (AHOB)

The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project (AHOB) aim to build a calendar of human presence and absence in Britain during the Pleistocene (1.8 million to 12,000 years ago).

The first phase of the project made groundbreaking discoveries dating human occupation of Britain back as far as 700,000 years. Phase two of the AHOB project (AHOB2), which runs until 2010, will continue to add data on the earliest human colonisations of Britain, but will also carry out more comparative studies in continental Europe. Amongst the goals of AHOB2 will be an attempt to recover DNA from a fragment of jawbone found at Kent’s Cavern in Devon which will help determine whether it is a modern human as previously believed, or a late Neanderthal. With a newly estimated date of 35,000, this fossil lies right at the time when modern humans could have first encountered the Neanderthals in western Europe.