Aridity in the Greater Middle East: paleoclimate insights into human-induced climate change and the history of our hominid ancestors

As Earth heats up this century in response to human forcing, precipitation patterns will change. Computer climate models predict that aridity will intensify in the Greater Middle East, a region that already contains half of the world's most water-stressed nations and stretches from the India-Pakistan border into the Fertile Crescent, across Arabia into the Horn of Africa. Yet, confidence in these predictions is low because the region lies at the fringes of influence of different drivers of African, Asian and European climate, where model performance is poorly understood. Geological records provide valuable climate context. For example, increased dust fluxes recorded by marine sediment cores have been used to suggest a direct link between Mesopotamian aridification and the collapse of the Akkadian empire ~4000 years ago. Published records, however, are too sparse, fragmentary and short to gain a full appreciation of rainfall response to natural forcing. You will address this problem by exploiting Ocean Drilling Program marine drill-cores from the northern Indian Ocean to improve understanding of hydroclimate variability in the region over the past 10 million years during strategic past intervals of known warmth and/or archaeological significance. Your work will improve predictions of climate response to warming over coming centuries