Conveners:
Giulia Margaritelli (Università degli Studi di Perugia)
Ilaria Mazzini (IGAG-CNR, Roma)
Sergio Bonomo (IGAG-CNR, Palermo)
Federica Badino (Università degli Studi di Firenze)
This scientific session will showcase recent advances in Quaternary research, with a specific focus on multi-proxy approaches to reconstruct past climate variability, human traces and environmental changes. The Quaternary represents an exceptional natural laboratory to investigate the mechanisms, rates and impacts of climate change across Earth systems, including human–environment interactions. The session aims to bring together multidisciplinary contributions addressing both terrestrial and marine archives, including lacustrine and marine sediments, soils and paleosols, speleothems, ice cores and biotic records. A broad range of proxies such as stable isotopes, microfossils, pollen, biomarkers, sedimentological and geochemical will be discussed in relation to their capacity to resolve past variations in temperature, precipitation patterns, ocean/atmosphere circulation, sea-level fluctuations, and ecosystem dynamics. Special emphasis will be given to (i) high-resolution records and robust chronological; (ii) identification of rapid events and tipping points; (iii) integration of proxy-based reconstructions with climate and Earth system modelling feedbacks and improve process understanding; (iv) Interactions between natural and anthropogenic forcings and their impacts on ecosystems. This session is addressed to all for Earth scientists working on past, present, and future climate variability, environmental dynamics and the interactions among these, looking at the sedimentary processes and life during Quaternary.