Quantification of past climates using speleothem material from Morocco and Chile

Our environmental systems are undergoing significant change in the present day because of unprecedented rises in greenhouse gas levels. To better understand future climate projections, we need to better understand the underlying mechanisms. This can be achieved by delving into our past climates and investigating natural climate variability under different background states and timescales. For this, we require environmental archives. I plan to focus on speleothem archives which are a particularly effective for reconstructing past terrestrial and atmospheric changes due to their high preservation, growth rates and highly accurate chronology (Henderson, 2006).