[Aqualist] Quaternary in the news

[Kathryn Fitzsimmons]

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/climate-horror-scenario-for-act/1410182.aspx#comments

Climate horror scenario for ACT

BY ROSSLYN BEEBY
SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT REPORTER, The Canberra Times
19/01/2009 9:14:00 AM
Canberra will be one of the cities hardest hit by future climate 
change across Australia, becoming much hotter and drier than 
previously thought, new research says.

This scenario is based on a new study mapping global warming trends 
that occurred across the Earth at the end of the last ice age some 
20,000 years ago.

Australian National University palaeoclimatologist Timothy Barrows said,

''The evidence suggests we can expect the changes here in Canberra to 
be greater than average as a result of global warming.

''We don't know exactly how much warmer it will get, but judging from 
past warming trends, Canberra will become significantly warmer and 
drier than previous projections have estimated.''

These ''greater than average'' temperature and rainfall changes would 
also affect the Snowy Mountains, the Murray-Darling Basin food bowl 
and four of Australia's biggest cities Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide 
and Perth. The trends also suggested Tasmania would become warmer.

The study's findings, published online today in the journal Nature 
Geoscience, are the result of several years of research involving 
scientists from 11 countries.

Using more than a million counts of fossil plankton from about 700 
deep-sea sediment cores, the research team has reconstructed detailed 
climate maps of the Earth's surface during the height of the last ice age.

During the warming period that occurred at the end of the last ice 
age, temperatures rose by as much as 6 to 10 degrees across Australia.

''We expect the same pattern of change will be repeated for future 
global warming, with temperate latitudes changing the most and the 
tropics changing the least. It should be wetter in the tropics and 
drier in the south as climate belts shift,'' Dr Barrows said.

He contributed Australian climate data and maps to the project, 
spending the past 12 years working in his free time and largely at 
his own expense collating and interpreting data from the sediment 
core and fossils.

Dr Barrows' research showed the mid-latitudes of the southern 
hemisphere extending from south of Brisbane to ''just beyond 
Tasmania'' and across to Perth would bear the brunt of global warming 
while the tropical latitudes were likely to be less affected.



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Kathryn Fitzsimmons
Postdoctoral Fellow
Luminescence Dating Laboratory
Research School of Earth Sciences
Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
Ph: +61 (02) 6125 4035
Fax: +61 (02) 6125 0738
kathryn.fitzsimmons at anu.edu.au

Editor
Quaternary Australasia
http://www.aqua.org.au