PhD student Matt Ryan from Victoria University in Wellington, NZ was awarded a Student Poster award at the recent INQUA congress in Japan. With many hundreds of posters presented at the conference, this is an excellent achievement for Matt. Congratulations!
Continue ReadingBy 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…
Continue ReadingBy Ignacio Jara Saying goodbye to 2014 and welcoming in 2015 is a good time to reflect. Apart from being the hottest year ever recorded, 2014 has passed really fast; with so many good research articles! Since good science always keeps my spirits high, I have decided to embark on the tricky task of recapping…
Continue ReadingBy Ignacio Jara The issue of whether the last glacial-interglacial transition was synchronous between the Northern Hemisphere (NH) and Southern Hemisphere (NH) has been an ongoing and often controversial debate amongst Quaternarists. There is now considerable amounts of proxy data for the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM; 22-19 ka) and the Last Glacial Termination (19-11 ka)…
Continue ReadingBy Ignacio Jara After the 2014 AQUA and biennial conference at Mildura, a group of attendees had the chance to travel north to visit the Mungo National Park in the Willandra Lakes region, New South Wales. This area features a series of dry lake basins bordered by old sand dunes. From the road the region…
Continue ReadingAQUA has a new constitution that was proposed and accepted at the recent AQUA 2014 Special General Meeting in Mildura. It was accepted by consumer affairs (Australia) on the 31st of July 2014. You can download and read the new constitution on the Committee and Constitution page. Look out for a short article in the upcoming QA (December 2014) about…
Continue ReadingBy 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…
Continue ReadingBy 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…
Continue ReadingBy 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…
Continue ReadingBy 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…
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