We are transforming the AQUA blog into an ECR blog. To kick off this refurbished blog, we will be interviewing AQUA researchers to know more about each other’s research, science journey, and life outside work. Do you want to be interviewed? Contact us to chat more! http://aqua.org.au/blogs/ecr-blog/

by Ignacio Jara It is now widely accepted that anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) emerged in Africa around 200 ka (ka=thousands of years before the present), as evidenced by now-classic hominid sites in eastern Africa and supported by genetic variations among modern populations. Despite the unquestioned African origin of our species, the time when modern…

By Ignacio Jara 26 January It is somewhat symbolic that the initial stop of my field season in Chile is the very same place where, one year ago, Brent Alloway and I finished Victoria University, Wellington, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences first international field trip with a traditional Patagonian asado (spit barbeque)… but…

By Ignacio A. Jara The Southern Annular (SAM) mode is one of the most important atmospheric phenomenon affecting temperature and precipitation in the non-tropical Southern Hemisphere. Perhaps the clearest sign of its growing importance for the scientific community was the mention of SAM in several talks in the SHAPE session in the AQUA biennial conference…

By Ignacio Jara Since the 1980’s a huge amount of time and effort has been put to build a climate-sensitive tree-ring chronology for New Zealand. A noteworthy achievement of this scientific effort was the publication in 2006 of two independent tree-ring chronologies, a 2,300-year record from Silver Pine (Lagarostrobos colensoi) and a 3,700-year chronology from…

By Ignacio Jara and Helen Bostock The debate about the role the Southern Alps (New Zealand) uplifting to offset global climate change has experienced a recent renewal with the publication of a couple of new articles. According to the Uplifting Theory, over geological time the tectonic erection of large mountain systems has been associated with…

By Ignacio A. Jara It has been widely documented that volcanic aerosols can alter the radiative balance of the atmosphere, producing measurable temperature depressions following large explosive eruptions. Perhaps the most renowned of these cases is the eruption of the mount Tambora in Indonesia, which in 1815 caused a decline of 0.5°C in the Northern…

By Ignacio A. Jara and Helen Bostock Terrestrial dust is important to the climate system not only because it may alter the solar radiative balance of the earth, but also because it supplies the oceans with key iron (Fe), a limiting micronutrient for phytoplankton productivity in the Southern Ocean. The “Iron Hypothesis” was first proposed…

By Helen Bostock Over the last decade the main theory to explain the changes in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 between glacials and interglacials, has primarily focussed on changes in the circulation of the Southern Ocean controlling the release of CO2 from the deep-ocean reservoir. However, there is still considerable debate about the path and…