3rd PAGES Varves Working Group workshop, program and abstracts

Abstract

During the past years there has been a great amount of new publications on varved sediment records, some of them describing methodological developments and others forming a basis of interpretation of climate and environmental change of mainly postglacial times. In many studies, the varve chronologies of lacustrine and marine sediments form a solid basis of dating, not to mention the environmental and climate signal that is stored in varves and laminae they contain. Since two years a step forward has been taken and the varve community is gathering during annual Varves Working Group (VWG) workshops to summarize what has been accomplished during the past decade and to exchange new ideas and promote their use in global climate reconstructions. The VWG has formed under the frame of the PAGES cross cutting theme 1 (CCT1) “Chronology” and CCT2 “Proxy development, calibration, validation” to address a number of topics with workshops and products. The main topics of the VWG include: • Methodological developments • Marine versus lacustrine varves • Varve chronologies, including quantification of age uncertainties • Calibration of archived climatic and environmental signals • Database management • Data processing • Learning from other annually resolved archives.