ELFT HÍRADÓ

[szpl <szpl AT metal.elte.hu>]

ELTE Fizikai Intézet

                                ORTVAY KOLLOKVIUM

                    2020. február 20., csütörtök, 15:00-kor
                Az ELTE Pázmány Péter s. 1/A alatti épületében
                           földszinti 0.81 előadóban


                                  Magyari Enikő
                (ELTE TTK Környezet- és Tájföldrajzi Tanszék)

   Climate change revealed by pollen analysis: rapid warmings and their
                            impacts on human societies

Kivonatos ismertetés:
The composition of the past vegetation and its changes can be inferred from 
morphological and quantitative studies of fossil pollen grains preserved in 
lake and mire sediments. The cell wall of pollen grains is made up of a 
sporopollenin (a chitin-like substance) that resists degradation in anoxic 
environment, while its eye-catching pattern is mostly species-specific, 
allowing plants to be identified at species, genus or family level. Vegetation 
changes during the Ice Ages (the last 2.6 million years of Earth's history) 
give an indirect picture of past climate changes. Using the principle of 
actualism, the temporal variation of pollen assemblages can be used to quantify
pas temperature, precipitation and evaporation changes, and the number of 
such studies have been increasing worldwide in recent years. In this 
presentation, I present the results of several pollen based climate 
reconstructions from the Carpathian Region covering the last glacial 
termination period, when the amplitude of warming exceeded or was of similar 
magnitude than the global warming witnessed today. I will take you through 
several examples of how rapid warming and cooling periods have influenced 
megafauna and prehistoric societies in East-Central Europe with special 
emphasis on the Carpathian Basin’s local climate that often showed attenuated 
change relative to NW Europe. I will demonstrate how and when the Late 
Pleistocene megafauna went extinct, how Middle and Late Neolithic societies 
were affected by climate change and what was the role of climate in the 
westward migration of Yamnaya, Pre-scythian and Scythian nomadic groups from 
Crimea at c. 5300 and 3000 years ago. I will also demonstrate how other proxy 
methods (e.g. stable isotopes, ancient DNA, diatom and chironomid studies) can 
be used to create multi-proxy reconstruction of past rapid environmental 
changes using the example of our South Carpathian high mountain lake sediment 
studies.