Past periods of global warmth can provide extraordinary insights into climate and life on the planet, beyond the range of recent experience. I am particularly interested in the operation of the climate system during warm periods that represent “modest greenhouse” conditions (late Eocene, mid Miocene, early-mid Pliocene, interglacials). Such climates provide a context for our current and future climate. Work has been downstream of two key regions for the global climate system: at the margins of the presently ice-covered Antarctic continent, and the monsoon-dominated Indian Ocean region.
Antarctica – see Beyond Ice website
Indian Ocean margins
Recent work on warm periods has focused on tropical locations around the Indian Ocean including biomarker records of climate and vegetation from Pliocene age sediments from Gulf of Aden (see human origins section), and with ongoing laboratory work on drill cores recovered from recent IODP Expedition 354 to the Bengal Fan and IODP Expedition 355 to the Indus Fan we are now reconstructing the long history of the Indian Monsoon.
Lee, H.*, Galy, V., Feng, X., Ponton, C.*, Galy, A., France-Lanord, C., Feakins, S.J. Sustained wood burial in the Bengal Fan across 19My, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1913714116. article data see also press page
Tauxe, L. and Feakins S.J., A re-assessment of the chronostratigraphy of late Miocene C3-C4 transitions, Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020PA003857. article
Feakins S.J., Liddy, H.M.*, Tauxe, L., Galy, V., Feng, X; Tierney, J.E.; Miao, Y.; Warny, S., Miocene C4 grassland expansion as revealed by the Indus Fan, Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, doi.org/10.1029/2020PA003856. article data
Amazonia:
Building off our work on modern ecosystems from Peru to Brazil, with calibrations of tropical montane and lowland forests, shrublands and grasslands, and their soils, we planned to move into paleoclimate reconstructions for the Cenozoic in the Amazon Basin. Planned for 2020, we are on the science parties for IODP Expedition 387 Amazon Margin and ICDP Trans Amazon Drilling Project to collect records of the South American climate and vegetation change. We await patiently for favorable conditions to resume planned sample collection efforts and the lab and analytical efforts beyond. The quest is towards understanding Cenozoic transitions in Amazonian ecosystems with relevance to the fate of these systems in a warmer future.