[Aqualist] Announcing SHAPE: Southern Hemisphere Assessment of PalaeoEnvironments

[Steven J Phipps]

We are proud to announce the successor of the AUS-INTIMATE initiative, 
which ran for two successive INQUA inter-congress periods from 2003 to 
2011 and culminated in the upcoming AUS-INTIMATE special issue in 
Quaternary Science Reviews.

SHAPE (Southern Hemisphere Assessment of PalaeoEnvironments; INQUA PALCOMM 
project #1302) will start in 2013 and continue until the next INQUA 
Congress in Japan in 2015. SHAPE will carry forward the goals of 
AUS-INTIMATE such as the production of high resolution palaeoclimate 
records during the late Quaternary. However, it will have a wider spatial 
scope, incorporating New Zealand, Australia, the Pacific Islands, South 
America, South Africa, Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. There will also 
be a stronger emphasis on climate modelling, data-model integration, 
development of new research tools and training activities for early career 
researchers.

SHAPE will support two existing INQUA International Focus Groups: CELL-50K 
(Calibrating Environmental Leads and Lags over the last 50ka) and ACER 
(Abrupt Climate Changes and Environmental Responses). Thus the time scale 
of the project extends back to 50-60 ka (the limit of radiocarbon dating).

The main objectives of SHAPE are to:

* generate defensible chronologies for SH proxy records

* refine and extend regional climate event stratigraphies

* provide robust interpretations of proxies (qualitative and quantitative)

* generate regional reconstructions of past environmental and climatic
   change (temporal-geographic syntheses)

* integrate the results into a hemispheric-wide story for key time
   slices, highlighting the changes and testing hypotheses for their causes

* conduct new climate model simulations for key periods

* integrate proxies with climate model simulations

* train the next generation of Quaternary scientists in key techniques

Suites of quantitative and qualitative marine and terrestrial climate 
reconstructions will underpin transects from the tropics to the mid and 
high-latitudes, illustrating changes in currents, fronts and temperature 
gradients. Like the goals of AUS-INTIMATE, the SHAPE project will 
highlight the timing of critical changes, and identify synchronous vs. 
asynchronous changes in climate.

However, unlike INTIMATE there will be a larger focus on using these proxy 
based reconstructions to compare with climate model simulations to 
determine distinct circulation and climate modes of the past. SHAPE will 
aim to reconstruct atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns for 
several critical periods in the Late Quaternary (including 32ka, 21ka, 
6ka) to improve our understanding Southern Hemisphere (SH) climate and 
environmental changes. These reconstructions will be compared to the PMIP3 
(Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project) and CMIP5 multi-model 
ensemble for these same time periods and a transient simulation for the 
last 8 ka. Integration with climate model simulations will also help us to 
formulate new hypotheses about triggers of climate change, climate 
dynamics, and mechanisms of inter-hemispheric climate teleconnections.

We encourage you to attend the SHAPE meetings and workshops over the next 
few years. SHAPE welcomes participation from early career researchers as 
well as established Quaternary scientists. There is a small amount of 
financial support for early career researchers to attend SHAPE meetings 
listed below.

* At Geosciences New Zealand Conference in November 2013, there will be a
   geochronology session covering the last 50 ka.

* The INQUA-ECR meeting in Wollongong, Australia in December 2013 will
   allow young researchers to present their work from specific regions.
   SHAPE will support this by providing travel support, mentoring in
   authorship of publications, and training on tools and model use within a
   SHAPE session.

* AQUA in Mildura in July 2014 will be a joint meeting with CELL-50K.

Training will be a key SHAPE activity. It will focus on using new tools 
designed for palaeoclimate research. We will utilize the Past 
Interpretation of Climate Tool (PICT), currently under development to 
generate targets for SH circulation patterns based on Australasian data, 
and other areas of the SH, to assist in interpreting hydroclimatic and 
circulation conditions linked to a wide array of climate drivers.  Proxy 
reconstructions and understanding of local responses to circulation 
changes will also help improve the interpretation of proxy data.

Expertise and assembly of proxy data for different SH sub-regions will be 
underpinned by existing and new INTIMATE 'groups'. The work within each SH 
sub-region, much like in the previous AUS-INTIMATE project, will be 
coordinated by steering committee members who will also be responsible for 
the exchange of information during hemisphere-wide integrations.

As with INTIMATE, we encourage you all to participate in this new project. 
Please contact Andrew Lorrey (a.lorrey at niwa.co.nz) or Steven Phipps 
(s.phipps at unsw.edu.au) for further details about SHAPE, and about how you 
can get involved.