A new article in Quaternary Science Reviews provides climate data for northwest Québec over the past 4,000 years. The study’s authors trace the vegetation and fire history of the region using pollen and charcoal from terrestrial and lacustrine sediment cores, showing fluctuations corresponding to general hemispheric trends. On the local level their findings show that cooling during the Holocene contributed to deforestation by limiting vegetative reproduction of spruce trees, so that when a fire cleared out the trees in area they could not bounce back. On a theoretical level, this study offers a method for reconstructing local differences within regional vegetation and climate histories. Read the full article here.
Department of History Annual Symposium "Climate Change in Historical Perspective"
The Department of History at Seton Hall University is proud to announce that its annual symposium in comparative history will take place virtually on Microsoft Teams: Friday, February 12th, 1 p.m. – 3 p.m.
This year's topic: "Destiny, Agency, and Adaptation: Climate Change in Historical Perspective."
The symposium brings together a panel of prominent scholars. A keynote address "Scale and Agency in the Anthropocene" by Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago) will be followed by a roundtable discussion, moderated by Professor John L. Brooke (Ohio State University), capped by a Q&A session, open to the attending audience.
The event is free and open to the public. You can access the symposium by clicking on this Microsoft Teams link »
For more information, see: https://www.shu.edu/history/news/symposium-climate-change-in-historical-perspective.cfm
The Holocene paleoenvironmental history of Western Caucasus (Russia) reconstructed by multi-proxy analysis of the continuous sediment sequence from Lake Khuko
A new sediment study at Lake Khuko in the western Caucasus shows a record of climate in the region going back 10,000 years – a first for the region. Based on their analysis, the researchers concluded that climate variation was the predominant driver of vegetation change in the region rather than human activity. Warm periods were as suggested by increased deposition of organic matter and the expansion of pollen assemblages typical of low and middle mountain zones, whereas cold periods were marked by increased erosion and the expansion of pollen from high-altitude species. In total the researchers were able to identify five principal phases of climatic change. Read the full paper here.
Volume 6, Issue 1 of the CHN Newsletter Published
Nicholas Cunigan, our newsletter editor, has published the latest issue of our Climate History Newsletter. Normally we published these newsletters every quarter, but of course 2020 has been anything but normal. This is our only newsletter of the year, so it’s packed full of content, including a nearly 20-page bibliography of the year’s publications in climate history, historical climatology, and paleoclimatology.
Download the issue by clicking here.
Climate and Society in European History
A new state of the field article in WIREs Climate Change identifies the opportunities and challenges facing historical climatologists working on Europe. These researchers point to a divergence in how writers from different disciplines treat causality and integrate information from other disciplines as grounds for greater interdisciplinary collaboration. They also propose a taxonomy for understanding the consequences of climate and extreme weather events. Read the entire article here.
Beyond megadrought and collapse in the Northern Levant: The chronology of Tell Tayinat
A new article on the site of Tell Tayinat in southwestern Turkey offers a new view on how the site’s inhabitants experienced climatic instability during the boundaries of the Early and Middle Bronze ages and the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age. Among other findings, the authors report that the local population appears to have flourished during these eras where the eastern Levant more broadly is said to have been undergoing a period of collapse. Instead, they find evidence of Tell Tayinat’s integration into long-range trade networks and agricultural prosperity, suggesting it may have acted as a “refugia” while other sites experienced climatic crisis. Read the full article here.
Age-dependent growth responses to climate from trees in Himalayan treeline
A new study analyzes the link between temperature and moisture in dendrochronological records, finding that a tree’s age plays a noticeable role in how sensitive a record is to each variable. Analyzing Abeis spectabilis trees from the treeline ecotone of central Nepal, the author found that spring growth in mature trees was most sensitive to differences in precipitation and that juveniles were more sensitive to variations in temperature. Read the full paper here.