Participation at the Fall 2011 AGU Meeting

By Dan Lunt

In December 2011, the American Geosciences Union (AGU) held its annual congress meeting in San Francisco. Several members of the project attended. Of particular interest was a session, chaired by three project members Gavin Foster, Richard Pancost and Dan Lunt, as well as Mark Pagani, titled “The pre-Quaternary concentration of atmospheric CO2 – proxies and mechanisms for change”.

The session discussed novel CO2 proxies, and explored mechanisms for how CO2 has varied in the past on multi-million year timescales.  Several of the talks, including the keynote address given by Prof Michael Bickle,  focussed on the role of weathering in controlling CO2 flux and the large uncertainties associated with this challenging field, were highlighted in many of the talks. It appears that there is still much work to be done!

The “Descent into the Icehouse” project will be making a crucial contribution to these issues, by improving proxy records of CO2 across the key Eocene-Oligocene transition.  Also by quantifying the importance of oceanographic changes in determining these CO2 changes, and their relation to changes in key oceanographic gateways.

This year nearly 20,000 Earth Scientists attended the meeting that focussed on a huge variety of topics (other highlights can be found at http://www.realclimate.org/).

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