Written by Ignacio Jara, Victoria University Wellington. While the abrupt climate transitions of the glacial termination and the establishment of the present-day modes of climate variation during the Holocene seems to be well characterized in proxy records around the Southern Hemisphere, there is still sparse evidence about the impact of those changes on the migration,…

Written by Ignacio Jara, Victoria University Wellington Although the long-term changes in solar insolation between Northern Hemisphere (NH) and the Southern Hemisphere (SH) are in anti-phase, marine and ice core records from both hemispheres show highly synchronous glacial/interglacial cycles over the last 800 kyr. This disparity between the insolation and the paleo-records is probably the…

Australia provides an outstanding case study to resolve the relationship between Late Quaternary environmental drivers such as climate variability, vegetation changes, wildfires, faunal extinctions and human activities. The interval between 50,000-40,000 years BP is critical for understanding the interplay of some of these factors and how they transformed the Australian landscape. During this period, humans…

Easter Island (or Rapa Nui) has continuously drawn the attention of the scientific community since it was first sighed by Dutch Sailors in 1722. By those early days it was already described as a mysterious and isolated islet boasting hundreds of monumental stone statue –the Moais– and as the only island of the South Pacific…

Hola, Kia ora everyone, My name is Ignacio Jara and I am PhD student from Chile, currently studying at the School of Earth Sciences at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. After one and a half years of living and studying in Wellington, New Zealand, I have been asked to write a monthly blog commenting on…