PAGES - Past Global Changes

Welcome to PAGES

The PAGES (Past Global Changes) project is an international effort to coordinate and promote past global change research. The primary objective is to improve our understanding of past changes in the Earth system in order to improve projections of future climate and environment, and inform strategies for sustainability. ... more

PAGES is open and inclusive to all scientists interested in past global changes. In February 2017, PAGES' parent organization Future Earth published a statement affirming its commitment to supporting international collaboration and the free movement of scientists and flow of data, information and knowledge for global sustainability. PAGES fully supports the Future Earth statement.

PAGES is funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Swiss Academy of Sciences, and supported in-kind by the University of Bern, Switzerland. It is a Global Research Project of Future Earth and a scientific partner of WCRP.

Read the latest e-news

Details: Published: Wednesday, 11 April 2018 15:09

Read about the latest PAGES' news, meetings and opportunities from around the world in this month's e-news.

Highlights include new working group products, a final reminder to apply for PAGES' Scientific Steering Committee, PAGES Early-Career Network updates and information on how to become an IPBES reviewer.

New paper in 2k special issue

Details: Published: Wednesday, 11 April 2018 11:01

Hans Linderholm et al. summarise the current understanding of Arctic hydroclimate during the past 2000 years in a new contribution to the PAGES 2k Network special issue of Climate of the Past.

Published yesterday, the paper, titled "Arctic hydroclimate variability during the last 2000 years: current understanding and research challenges", reviews the main natural archives and proxies used to infer past hydroclimate variations in this remote region and outlines the difficulty of disentangling the moisture from the temperature signal in these records.

It also shows the potential for providing a high-resolution hydroclimate reconstruction for the Arctic and a comparison with last-millennium simulations from fully coupled climate models. Read the paper here.

Access all "Climate of the past 2000 years: regional and trans-regional syntheses" special issue papers here.

CoralHydro2k workshop report

Details: Published: Tuesday, 10 April 2018 11:42

Find out what happened at the PAGES 2k Network CoralHydro2k project meeting in September 2017 in their recent Eos report.

Jens Zinke et al. discuss why corals are a key archive for understanding variability over seasons, years and decades in "Reconstructing climate and environment from coral archives".

The project's future plans are also highlighted.

Read more about the project and join the mailing list to be involved!

Antarctica 2k - EGU and BBC

Details: Published: Monday, 09 April 2018 14:11

A paper from the PAGES 2k Network Antarctica 2k project, discussed at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly in Vienna, Austria, today, has been featured on the BBC News website.

Presented at the EGU by 2k Network member Liz Thomas, authors use 79 ice-core snow accumulation records in their paper "Regional Antarctic snow accumulation over the past 1000 years", published in Climate of the Past in November 2017.

Thomas said the work was undertaken to try to put current ice losses into a broader context. Read the BBC interview with Thomas here.

Read the British Antarctic Survey press release here.

Read the Antarctica 2k paper here. It is a contribution to the upcoming 2k Network Special Issue "Climate of the past 2000 years: regional and trans-regional syntheses".

GPWG2 workshop report

Details: Published: Monday, 09 April 2018 13:23

A new workshop report in Wildfire Magazine from PAGES' Global Paleofire Working Group 2 (GPWG2) highlights the Global Charcoal Database and the group's productive history.

Written by Kendrick Brown et al., the report, titled "Applying paleofire records in ecological management", stems from the "Paleofire knowledge for current and future ecosystem management" meeting held in Montreal, Canada, in October 2017. The purpose of the workshop was to explore the applicability of fire history data in ecosystem management.

Read the report here.

Iso2k project update in Eos

Details: Published: Monday, 09 April 2018 12:46

The Iso2k project of the PAGES 2k Network has published a project update report in Eos.

Titled "Piecing Together the Big Picture on Water and Climate", authors Bronwen Konecky et al. discuss a new database which brings together water isotope data from many sources, providing an integrated resource for studying changes in Earth’s hydroclimate over the past 2,000 years.

Measuring changes in the relative abundances of heavy oxygen and hydrogen isotopes recorded in natural archives provides a way to reconstruct local, regional, and even global climate signals.

The Iso2k effort is currently the only global hydroclimate database being constructed for the Common Era, and provides a comprehensive synthesis of heavy oxygen and hydrogen isotope records in a format suitable for regional-scale climate reconstructions or for data-model comparisons.

Read the report here.