Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Koç K., Fleitmann D.(Yürütücü)
Diğer Ülkelerdeki Kamu Kurumları Tarafından Desteklenmiş Proje, 2024 - 2027
SW Asia (Eastern Turkey, Iraq, and Iran) is an important region for paleoclimate and paleoenvironmental research as it is a sensitive hotspot to climate change, where water availability, as an often scarce and unequally distributed resource, is a key parameter for societal stability today and in the past. Climate in SW Asia is influenced by two major climate systems; the North Atlantic/Siberian pressure system in winter and the Indian monsoon in summer. To date, the interaction between these systems remains highly uncertain, warranting further investigations. In addition, SW Asia is a key region where three of the most fundamental transformations in human history took place: the rise of agriculture, the emergence of advanced complex societies, and the development of the first cities, states, and empires. It is very likely that both climatic and environmental conditions were important factors contributing to these profound socio-cultural transformations, some of which led to the rise and fall of empires. Our understanding of the causes and patterns of climatic changes and their influence on the environment in SW Asia has remained uncertain due to the brevity of instrumental records and the scarcity of precisely dated and highly resolved climatic and environmental reconstructions. To go beyond scarce existing reconstructions, this SNSF Sinergia project termed MITRA (named after the Indo-Iranian god and spirit of the rain and of the sun), will develop a dense network of different paleo records and climate model simulations to understand past changes of the complex climate in SW Asia, in particular the hydroclimate. We will use the most promising and most widespread archives in SW Asia, namely speleothems, lakes, and marine sediments along a nearly 2,000 km-long N-S transect stretching from Eastern Turkey to the Persian Gulf. Such a comprehensive approach will allow us to develop a network of precisely-dated multi-proxy multi-archive climatic and environmental records. These records will form a unique confluence of numerous physical, chemical and biological parameters to reconstruct a wide range of climatic and environmental variables, thereby reducing the uncertainties associated with the interpretation of single parameter studies. Moreover, a dense network of paleorecords is required to address the great spatial heterogeneity of climate in SW Asia; connecting the gap between the more widely studied European, Mediterranean and Central Asian regions. The new climatic and environmental network created by MITRA will be compared to high resolution climate model simulations, which generate process understanding of long- and short-term climate variability in SW Asia. The climate model simulations will be extended into the future so that future climate change will be placed into context of millennia long climate variability. Furthermore, MITRA will provide the data that are urgently needed by archaeologists and historian to investigate the climatic-environmental-human connections in the recent and distant past.