Floods metadata collection

Details: Published: Monday, 12 December 2016 15:17

Can you assist?

PAGES' Floods Working Group (FWG) would like to assemble a worldwide overview of the existing (published) flood records based on historical or natural archives.

This metadata collection will serve:
- to promote all these records to a broad community (through the FWG web site and at the 5th PAGES OSM - Zaragoza, 9-13 May 2017);
- as a first step for the database project of the FWG; and
- as a basis for a review paper on flood reconstructions.

To promote your record(s), please take a few minutes to provide very basic metadata on flood records you produced using this excel file.

Details on the different entries of the excel sheet are described here (pdf).

Examples are also given in the excel spreadsheet.

Once filled in, please email the excel file to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Please feel free to transfer this request to any colleagues who might be interested.

Farewell to PAGES' co-chair

Details: Published: Monday, 12 December 2016 11:09

hubertus fischer web Positive answers to two seemingly unrelated questions have led to an outstanding career dedicated to ice-core research for PAGES' outgoing co-chair Hubertus Fischer.

'Do you ski?' and 'Can you cook?' were enough to lure Fischer away from other Master's thesis possibilities. "I could full-heartedly say yes to both."

The questions were posed in 1993 by his eventual University of Heidelberg MSc and PhD supervisor Dietmar Wagenbach, who promptly asked if Fischer was willing to help conduct research in Greenland. He went twice within two years, further fueling his passion for ice-core studies. "These two trips to Greenland in 1993 and 1994 were real expeditions," said Fischer. "We rode over 1000km over the ice on skidoos, drilling shallow cores every 50km. It was not with sled dogs of course, like in the old days, but it was really going 'into the unknown'.

"Deep ice-core drilling projects are more organized, so those two expeditions were my first and most lasting experience, because of the remoteness ... to be in the field, taking care of your science and yourself … the beauty of the ice sheet and the solitude. It was also exhausting!"

Defining the Anthropocene

Details: Published: Thursday, 08 December 2016 09:30

PAGES' visiting guest scientist Erle Ellis is the lead author of a comment piece on defining the Anthropocene, which was published yesterday in Nature.

Ellis et al. argue that the causes of Earth's transition are human and social, therefore scholars from those disciplines must be included in its formalization.

As a tie-in with the paper, Future Earth conducted a Q&A session with Ellis, who further explained why efforts to put a start date on the Anthropocene should not be rushed.

Access the Nature paper here.

Access the Q&A here.

Guest scientist lecture, Bern

Details: Published: Monday, 05 December 2016 14:01

Ellis cu1 web PAGES' guest scientist Erle Ellis presents "Global Land Change: From Pleistocene to Anthropocene" in Bern, Switzerland, on Wednesday 7 December.

Human's have been transforming landscapes across Earth for millennia. This lecture will present results on the causes, consequences and dynamics of this unprecedented anthropogenic global change and its role in the emergence of the Anthropocene.

When: Wednesday 7 December 2016
Time: 14:15
Where: Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Hallerstrasse 10, Seminar Room 310 (CDE)

Read more about Ellis' work and his reasons for being in Bern here.

Read the latest e-news

Details: Published: Wednesday, 16 November 2016 15:35

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

New Africa2k paper in QSR

Details: Published: Friday, 11 November 2016 11:05

Members of PAGES' Africa2k working group published their latest paper in Quaternary Science Reviews today.

Written by David Nash et al., "African hydroclimatic variability during the last 2000 years" presents an extensive assessment and discussion of proxy, historical and instrumental evidence for hydroclimatic variability across the African continent in the last two millennia.

The paper includes a systematic review of African paleomoisture records, reviews hydroclimates from the first millennium AD to the period of recent warming (with a particular focus on the Medieval Climate Anomaly and Little Ice Age) and explores potential drivers of hydroclimate variability.

Access the paper here.

Read more about the Africa2k working group here.

VICS report in Eos

Details: Published: Friday, 11 November 2016 10:22

A workshop report from the first meeting of PAGES' Volcanic Impacts on Climate and Society Working Group (VICS) working group was published yesterday in Eos.

"How Did Climate and Humans Respond to Past Volcanic Eruptions?" discusses how the strongest volcanic eruptions of the past are powerful test cases to predict and prepare for future climate change.

Access the workshop report here.