As Charles Lyell famously wrote: “the past is key to the present”. Over the past two million years, the Earth has experienced a diverse range of environmental catastrophes. Defined as significant disruptions in the natural environment caused by phenomena such as abrupt climate change, volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts, and storms (including tropical cyclones), their effects can have profound impacts on the function of terrestrial environments and the resilience of the organisms within them. This includes Homo sapiens, for whom environmental crises have been a frequent feature of their evolutionary history. Today, humanity is becoming increasingly vulnerable to an increasing range of environmental extremes. This calls for a renewed focus on developing long-term, paired records of past environmental extremes and their resulting crises worldwide.
This session will explore how different environmental catastrophes have affected the Earth's system over the past two million years. We invite abstracts with interests ranging from analyses of paleo-environmental archives, development of new geochemical proxies, and refinements in robust quantitative and sophisticated statistical techniques – all of which can be applied to the long-term synthesis of diverse research fields and an understanding of the complex relationships between natural and anthropogenically driven impacts on the climate system.
Specific foci may include:
1. Crises throughout human history: Investigating past environmental extremes and their impacts on humans and their societies.
2. Earth system crises: Examining the environmental consequences of environmental crises driven by natural processes (e.g., volcanism, earthquakes, hydrological extremes, and abrupt climate shifts)
3. Quantitative exploration of qualitative phenomena: Utilizing large datasets to understand the occurrence and drivers of environmental crises.