Friday 4
Sessions générales

› 11:30 - 11:45 (15min)
PaleoMex
Marie-Alexandrine Sicre  1@  
1 : laboratoire des sciences du climat et de l'environnement  (LSCE)  -  Website
CNRS : UMR8212
Domaine du CNRS, ave de la Terrasse 91198 Gif-sur-Yvette -  France

PaleoMex aims at documenting the Mediterranean climate and hydrological cycle over the Holocene and its impact on human societies. The Mediterranean basin is lying within a transition zone between subtropical and temperate climates where strong E-W and N-S gradients exists and where important changes have occurred in the past and are predicted in the near future by IPCC scenarii (IPCC, 2007). Owing to its climatological location, the small size of the basin, and the important development of ancient societies in its surroundings, the Mediterranean region represents a unique experimental object to foster our knowledge on the complex interactions between climate, environment and man in the recent past. For this, climate needs to be understood at regional and local scales to fully appraise paleo-hydrological regimes. Assessment of the seasonality of precipitations and temperatures is an important issue as these factors undoubtedly played a central role for agriculture and plant cultivation in the Levant basin and motivated sedentary economy in the Early Holocene (Neolithization). Mediterranean climate fluctuated significantly over the Holocene at a rather small scale but many areas of the Mediterranean basin lack of high-resolution proxy reconstructions. Here, we present 5 projects that have been proposed by the PaleoMex program to organize a research network for generating proxy reconstructions along two E-W transects using continental archives (HOTMED and ISOMEX). Extreme events will also be investigated using lagoonal deposits and coastal sediments (WEATHER and GOLHO). In parallel, the ARCHEMED project will explore the links between abrupt changes and social and cultural in the Balkan-Aegean Sea that have occurred since the 8.2 kyr event.

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