Séminaire
Why do we tie? A critique of tuning in palaeoclimatology
Date
June 5, 2013 10:45 amLieu Salle Stendhal, DGO, Bâtiment B18
Intervenant(s) Maarten BLAAUW, School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeocology, Queen's University Belfast |
Résumé
Tuning is a widespread and widely accepted approach to combine, date and interpret multiple fossil proxy archives through aligning supposedly synchronous events between the archives. This approach will be reviewed through literature examples, ranging from peat and tephra layers to orbital tuning and %18O series from marine and ice deposits. Potential problems will be highlighted such as the dangers of circular reasoning, unexpected proxy behaviour and unrecognised chronological uncertainties, and some solutions suggested. Fossil proxy research could become much enhanced if tuning were approached in a more quantitative, reliable and objective way, and especially if individual proxy archives were not tuned and kept on independent time-scales.