Reconstruction of past interactions between climate and environment is among the key grand challenges of Earth System Science. The focus on past environmental and climatic reconstruction on subannual to multi-decadal timescales has been growing in light of rapid changes in the climate system due to global warming and the increasing occurrence of extreme events. The goal is that climate and environmental interactions from the past can be studied in the same resolution as current and projected trends of the 21st century (i.e., seasonal, annual and decadal resolution). However, obtaining high-resolution qualitative and quantitative information from annually or even seasonally laminated climate archives remains challenging due to the limitations of conventional analytical methodologies.
Recent developments in imaging techniques laid the foundations for a unique opportunity to unlock paleoclimate signals from geological archives at µm-resolution. These techniques can continuously explore geochemical and mineralogical compositions on the sample surface at µm-resolution and include, for example, micro X-Ray Florescence (μXRF) scanning, Hyperspectral Imaging, Mass Spectrometry Imaging, or Micro-Computed Tomography (μCT) scanning. When applied to annually resolved paleoclimate archives, imaging techniques provide 2D- or 3D- μm-scale maps of proxy distribution, paving the way to generate qualitative and quantitative information of subannually to interannually resolved climate and environmental evolution. Moreover, the unprecedented resolution of these techniques has great potential to contribute to a variety of fields in Earth System Sciences beyond climate reconstruction, including investigation of diagenetic processes and microbial communities, tracking of environmental contamination or detecting cryptotephras.
This session welcomes all contributions that utilize imaging techniques on, preferably but not exclusively, seasonally or annually resolved climate archives in various fields of Earth System Sciences. We encourage the submission of abstracts on research dedicated to method developments of imaging-based proxy applications, data postprocessing and calibration, and the combination of complementary or congruent imaging techniques. We especially hope that this session will also appeal to a broader audience of geoscientists who do not focus on developing imaging techniques but who might present research supported by high-resolution scanning/imaging data.