Climate and paleoclimate

ISMAR contributes to study the natural variability of Earth’s climate and the impact of human activities that are stressing the climate system. Changes in Earth’s climate are governed by complex interactions involving the atmosphere, the oceans, planetary volcanism, the cryosphere, the biosphere and external forces such as variability of solar radiation.

ISMAR is a key scientific actor in the Mediterranean region maintaining long-term time series of coupled oceanological and meteorological data suitable to permit a quantitative and reliable definition of the ongoing climate change. On longer scales ISMAR exploits natural archives from a number of situations using a variety of geochemical and biological proxies (sedimentological, biological, geochemical, and magnetic properties) to reconstruct the natural and anthropic impacts on the climate system since the onset of the Holocene and, on longer time scales, the evolution of Quaternary glacial cycles and their driving mechanisms.