Estimating regional flood discharge during Palaeocene-Eocene global warming.

Among the most urgent challenges in future climate change scenarios is accurately predicting the magnitude to which precipitation extremes will intensify. Analogous changes have been reported for an episode of millennial-scale 5 °C warming, termed the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM; 56 Ma), providing independent constraints on hydrological response to global warming. However, quantifying hydrologic extremes during geologic global warming analogs has proven difficult.

Autogenic geomorphic processes determine the resolution and fidelity of terrestrial paleoclimate records.

Terrestrial paleoclimate records rely on proxies hosted in alluvial strata whose beds are deposited by unsteady and nonlinear geomorphic processes. It is broadly assumed that this renders the resultant time series of terrestrial paleoclimatic variability noisy and incomplete. We evaluate this assumption using a model of oscillating climate and the precise topographic evolution of an experimental alluvial system.

Fluvial response to abrupt global warming at the Palaeocene/Eocene boundary.

Climate strongly affects the production of sediment from mountain catchments as well as its transport and deposition within adjacent sedimentary basins. However, identifying climatic influences on basin stratigraphy is complicated by nonlinearities, feedback loops, lag times, buffering and convergence among processes within the sediment routeing system. The Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum (PETM) arguably represents the most abrupt and dramatic instance of global warming in the Cenozoic era and has been proposed to be a geologic analogue for anthropogenic climate change.