[Sasnet] Invitation to attend INQUA (Cairns) session on 'Abrupt environmental and archaeological change' (fwd)

[Bonnie A B Blackwell]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 13:46:10 +1100
From: Chris Turney <turney at UOW.EDU.AU>
To: QUATERNARY at CLIFFY.UCS.MUN.CA
Subject: Invitation to attend INQUA (Cairns) session on 'Abrupt
    environmental and archaeological change'

Dear colleagues,

Apologies for any cross posting.

You are invited to attend the following session at the XVII INQUA Congress (Cairns, Australia, 28 July - 3 August 2007):  Abrupt environmental and archaeological changes: testing the chronological assumptions.  Session convenors: Chris Turney (Australia) and John Lowe (UK).

Please be aware, the abstract deadline is Wednesday 31 January 2007.

Session summary: This proposed session will invite reports on the development of novel approaches for the construction of age models that enable late Quaternary events to be dated and correlated at a centennial, decadal or annual resolution. There is a growing awareness of the urgency with which significant advances in dating precision is required. The publication of the Greenland ice-core records from the early 1990s shed new light on the frequency and abrupt nature of climate shifts during the last glacial-interglacial cycle. This in turn has spawned a number of ideas about the nature, links and causes of climate change at the continental and global scales, and concerning their environmental effects. These include, for example, the synchroneity (or otherwise) of sub-millennial oscillations (D-O events), inter-hemispheric climate links (bipolar seesaw), whether thermohaline circulation changes are initiators or consequences of abrupt climate change, and the nature and rate !
 of!
 human responses to abrupt climate change. Because traditional approaches to geological dating rarely provide the sub-millennial resolution required to test these ideas robustly, major efforts are under way to secure a higher dating precision. This session will aim to provide an overview on recent or anticipated progress in this regard. Contributions are invited from any part of the globe and dealing with any aspect of environmental and/or archaeological change, with the proviso that the focus is on novel approaches for refining age models.

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Dr. Chris Turney