2014 Articles

Present and Past Mineral Dust Variations- a Cross-Disciplinary Challenge for Research

Rousseau, Denis-Didier; Stuut, J. B. W.; Winckler, Gisela

In its recently published report, the intergovernmental Panel Climate Change identified the role of mineral dust in the Earth system and the uncertainties it introduces to the total aerosol radiative forcing and climate projections as key topics for future research. Achieving a thorough understanding of feedback associated with eolian dust is a challenge for a number of Earth science disciplines as mineral dust processes operate on a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. On the other hand, studies of mineral dust contribute significantly to research on past climatic and environment conditions enabled by dust preserved in different kinds of depositional paleoclimate archives.Such work has been the focus of PAGES' recently concluded ADOM (Atmospheric Dust during the last glacial cycle: Observations and Modeling) working, which was established in 2008 with the goal of combining reconstructions of climate and atmospheric circulation from terrestrial, marine and ice-core records with modern dust evidence and model simulations of past and present atmospheric circulation.