Abstract

The Study Group addresses climatic and oceanographic reconstructions from the Southeastern (SE) Pacific focusing on Late Quaternary variability, including high-resolution studies of the Holocene and land-ocean interactions. This group brings together specialists in marine geology, paleoceanography, paleoecology, biogeochemistry, climate research, development of new proxies, and modelling. Atmosphere-ocean interactions in high latitudes play an important role for understanding processes and feedbacks of past and future climate change. These interactions are believed to control sea-ice cover, upper ocean stratification, biological nutrient utilization, and exposure rates of deep-water, all of which have been considered to play a key role for explaining the variability in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The SE Pacific region and particularly the continental margin of southern South America, including the fjord region, offer a unique opportunity to study atmosphere-ocean changes at time-scales otherwise difficult to access in the Southern Ocean realm. This includes, for example, the potential of reconstructing paleoceanographic changes over the last glacial/ interglacial cycle at millennial time-scales based on sediment records from the southernmost Chilean continental slope close to the entrance of the Drake Passage. Moreover, ultra high resolution sediment records are available in particular within the fjords of southern Chile. Such records are very useful for extending the few available instrumental climate time series at polar and subpolar latitudes which cover only the past few decades and thus miss a long-term perspective. Such perspective is, however, crucial for distinguishing natural and anthropogenic climate changes.