Research on our historical climate receives major EU research grant
The annual rings of a tree tell the story of how the Earth's climate has varied over hundreds of years. Researcher Jesper Björklund has been awarded SEK 24 million by the European Research Council (ERC) to develop cutting-edge research on the climate archives of trees.
Jesper Björklund area of research is tree rings, also known as dendrochronology. Previously, the ring width of a tree ring has mainly been the starting point for tree ring research. With the help of a new AI-facilitated analysis method, developed together with research colleagues in Switzerland, tree rings can now be fingerprinted at the cellular level over thousands of years.
– Analyzing wood anatomy at the cellular level provides much more precise information and we can gain new insights into how the Earth's climate has changed over thousands of years. My hope is to use this method to produce high quality data that can be used by many researchers in multiple studies for a long time to come.
Obtaining greatly improved climate information from trees will make it possible to better verify and adapt the climate models used today to predict the Earth's future climate change.
– Then we can draw robust conclusions about which climate changes are caused by the Earth's natural processes and which are caused by human activity on Earth,” says Jesper Björklund.
The tree as a climate calendar
The trees analyzed have mainly grown in places inaccessible to human civilization. They are found by tree-ring researchers in lakes, river beds and in the tracks of retreating glaciers, in both the southern and northern hemispheres. Data from tree-ring cores are analyzed and form time series that span millennia. In this way, the Earth's historical climate can be reconstructed, calendar year by calendar year.
– Dendrochronology provides a richer context to different events in human history. We can accurately link the climatic response of trees during a particular event, such as a volcanic eruption, to how the climate changed and civilization was affected by climate change.
With the ERC Consolidator Grant, Jesper Björklund and the University of Gothenburg Laboratory for Dendrochronology (GULD) will investigate the differences in temperature history between the northern and southern hemispheres that have puzzled scientists for some time. Previous studies have shown that trees in the southern hemisphere respond differently to climate change compared to those in the northern hemisphere, which in turn can affect the interpretation of climate models.
ERC Consolidator Grant
The ERC Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) is part of the EU's Horizon Europe program. This year, a total of 328 researchers from 25 European countries received €678 million to conduct cutting-edge research. Among them, 14 researchers were linked to Swedish universities. One of these is Jesper Björklund with the project: “BOREAUSTRALIS, Resolving troubling discord in Boreal versus Austral late Holocene temperature history”.
Contact:
Jesper Björklund, forskare och naturgeograf, Institutionen för geovetenskaper, Göteborgs universitet, e-post: jesper.bjorklund@gu.se
Ordet dendrokronologi är grekiskt och dendro-krono-logi står för träd, tid och vetenskap.
