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Abstract

Well established data from Tertiary sediments of the northern landmasses of Europe, Asia, and America, and from the oceans of the North Atlantic, North Pacific, and the Arctic, have recently been reviewed at an international meeting of specialists from palaeontology, geology, evolutionary biology, meteorology, and physiology. Experts in computing and statistics have also been involved in modelling the data to reveal various types of climate change. These interdisciplinary consultations now involve experts from North America, Russia, and Europe, working together for the first time, and some of the cultural and philosophical difficulties of these new partnerships are described. The problems under investigation relate to changes in temperature, sea level, atmosphere composition, ocean currents, and land masses during the past 65 million years.

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The NATO Advanced Research Workshop Arcto-Tertiary ’93 was entitled ‘Reconstruction of North Atlantic climate change over the last 65 million years, using extinct plant data’. The objective was ‘to accumulate evidence from extinct plants that impinge on climate change during the Tertiary in the Arctic, to make data more readily available, to interpret it and to actively manage it’. Details of a 43 page booklet of abstracts are available from the present author and a workshop volume, in the Springer-Verlag NATO Global Environmental Change programme, is being prepared for publication.

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Arctic climates 65 million years of change

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