Climcor: Paleoclimatic Coring: High Resolution and Innovations.Cnrs Gathers the Present Coring Equipment , and Coordinates the Different Efforts Provided By the Concerned Communities (ocean, ice and continent)

Abstract:

Global climate changes have been evidenced in various ways since the start of paleoclimatology in the 70s. The access to past atmosphere conditions in the air bubbles trapped in ice-cores gave an important impulse as it made the green-house gases concentrations accessible a prerequisite for climate modelers. Indeed since the publication of CO2 and CH4 variations over the last climate cycle in Vostok ice-cores, our knowledge of the past climate conditions has improved tremendously. However, improvements in technical equipment and approaches indicate that more is still to come inducing expected new findings in terms of mechanisms. The IMAGES program yielded very good quality and long marine cores that permitted to compare marine and ice-core records with high confidence. Moreover they permitted to improve the knowledge of past oceans dynamics, especially those linked to the massive discharges of icebergs in the oceans, impacting the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. On the continent, various environments are drilled and cored to provide also comparable and reliable records of past climate: lakes, peatbogs, speleothems and loess. These records are complementary yielding important dataset to feed the earth system models necessary for a better understanding of past climate dynamics.
Technical limitation of the present equipments does not allow such important jump in the quality of the data, and therefore in the knowledge of i, past climate variations at extremely high resolution and ii, of the behavior of the different domains as studied in IPCC experiments while societal requirements are more and more expressed by policy makers. C2FN initiative at CNRS gathers the present coring equipments located in labs or at the technical division of INSU, and coordinates the different efforts provided by the concerned communities (ocean, ice and continent). Valorization of the results obtained are published in high ranked scientific journals and presented in scientific meetings. Moreover the technological improvements and developments in coring activities are likely to result in patent applications that the DT INSU realizes in the framework of its activities and duties. CLIMCOR project intends to provide the French scientific community, the top-level technological support.