science activities

science structure

While PAGES itself is not a research institution, it helps to develop common international science directions and ensure that important scientific questions are addressed in a coherent manner. Based on input from its multidisciplinary community, PAGES works to identify and understand those aspects of past climate and environmental change that are of greatest significance for the future of human societies.

The scope and focus of paleoscience research is continuously evolving; as questions are answered, others are raised. To keep up to date with these advances, PAGES revised the scope of its science structure in 2005. It now addresses four Foci and four Cross-Cutting Themes (CCT). Each Focus covers a set of questions that is of prime importance to the global community. The CCT are more general in their scope and are of fundamental relevance to all Foci and to paleoscience in general.



Fig. 1. PAGES scientific structure: Four thematic Foci (colored circles) are complemented by four circling Cross-Cutting Themes that are of relevance to all Foci.


Foci and CCT Leaders

Each Foci and CCT are led by one or more members of the SSC, who help organize and drive the collaborations, workshops and syntheses that are required to move each topic forward. If you would like to get involved, please contact the relevant person listed below.

Foci

Focus 1: Climate Forcings
Bette Otto-Bliesner and Jérôme Chappellaz

Focus 2: Regional Climate Dynamics
Heinz Wanner, Eystein Jansen, Cathy Whitlock and José Carriquiry

Focus 3: Global Earth-System Dynamics
Peter Kershaw, Zhongli Ding, Michael Schulz, Eric Wolf and Takeshi Nakatsuka

Focus 4: Human-Climate-Ecosystem Interactions
John Dearing and Mohammed Umer

Cross-Cutting Themes

CCT 1: Chronology
Pierre Francus

CCT 2: Proxy development, Calibration and Validation
José Carriquiry and Ricardo Villalba

CCT 3: Modeling
Bette Otto-Bliesner and Michael Schulz

CCT 4: Data Management
Thorsten Kiefer