Quaternary sciences – the view from the mountains
Meeting report from the XVIII INQUA Congress in Bern
For the first time the world congress of quaternary sciences took place in Switzerland, namely in Bern. Two thousand researchers met for one week in July 2011 to discuss questions like: What exactly was the trigger for the ice ages? How does the Earth work?
Quaternary science is an interdisciplinary field of study focusing on the last few million years. It uses proxy evidence to reconstruct the past environments during this period to infer the climatic and environmental changes that have occurred. To study the past gives a unique opportunity to improve predictions for the future.
With 1500 posters and close to 500 oral talks in 110 sessions, this congress was the largest so far. The broad participation of young scientists in the poster competition showed both their lively interest and the wide field of research and was rewarded by 15 poster prizes.
Eight excellent plenary talks opened up the wide range of topics. Two highlights shall illustrate this: Maureen Raymo, a paleoclimatologist and marine geologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University studies the history and causes of climate change in the Earth’s past and has tackled many aspects of paleoclimate and orbital forcings. In 2006, she published a much discussed hypothesis in Science to explain why the 41,000-year Milankovitch cycle appears less pronounced in the sea level over the past 500,000 years. Raymo proposed that ice growth at one pole and ice decay at the other occur at the same time and therefore cancel each other out in the signal of ice volume change in global records. She argues that the Antarctic ice sheet is more dynamic than previously believed and therefore capable of considerable change.
Berhane Asfaw, a paleoanthropologist who studied geology at Addis Ababa University and anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, has contributed enormously to paleoanthropology by the discovery and analysis of evidence spanning the last ten million years of human evolution. Moreover, his research and publications have demonstrated that anatomically modern humans were present in Africa 160,000 years ago. In his presentation in Bern, Asfaw talked about hominid evolution and its environmental context.
ProClim- supported the conference as sponsor of three poster awards. The ProClim- secretariat coordinated the poster award election process and was part of the local organizing committee.