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…

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…