Past Climates: Icehouse to Greenhouse

This subject explores the Earth’s past and present climates, from billion year to hundred year time scales. The subject also deals with the wide range of causes of past climates and of climate change. Climate episodes discussed may include: Precambrian Snowball Earth, Gondwanan Glaciations, the Mesozoic Hothouse, global cooling over the last 20 million years and increasing aridity in Australia over the last 5 million years. The subject also covers the record of regular Ice Age cycles, abrupt climate change, global and regional climate variability of the past 1000 years, and natural and human factors contributing to modern climate change. We use climate ‘proxy’ records such as ice cores, tree rings, corals, sedimentary records and historical documents to identify more recent changes in the Australian region.

考察地球历史上气候变化的模式、驱动因素及其对环境的影响。

• 1explain the drivers of the Earth's climate over time-scales ranging from days to centuries
• 2explain why past climates such as ice-ages differ from our present climate with reference to climat drivers
• 3describe how palaeoclimate observations are made and explain how they are used in reconstructing the past climate
• 4synthesise knowledge from historical records for the Australian region and use it to understand future climate change projections