FWO Wetenschappelijke Prijs Klimaatonderzoek - Niels De Winter

Past climate events provide a natural laboratory for testing the impact of perturbations on Earth’s climate. Therefore, reconstructions of past climate are of fundamental importance for testing our understanding of the climate system and building better climate models. Unfortunately, current archives for climate reconstruction in deep time (millions of years in the past), such as sediment records, lack the resolution to inform us about climate change on human timescales: days to decades. In my research, I combine techniques on the interface between biology, chemistry, and geology to develop tools for reconstructing short-term climate variability. I do so mainly (including in this proposal) by studying how shell-building organisms such as mollusks store detailed climate information in their shells, which, when fossilized, serve as “time capsules” containing snapshots of past climate variability on the human timescale. These detailed reconstructions teach us the link between climate change and extreme weather events