Coal as ice: Revolutionizing deep-time climate archives
Name of applicant
Mads Engholm Jelby
Title
Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution
University of Bergen
Amount
DKK 1,963,736
Year
2024
Type of grant
Reintegration Fellowships
What?
This project sets out to bridge the gaps of deep-time paleoclimate knowledge by utilizing ancient coal seams in the same way as modern ice cores to produce ultra-high-resolution climate records. The precursor to coal is peat, which grows in a sensitive balance with climate while storing depositional records of atmospheric mineral dust, critical for understanding changes in Earth’s energy budget.
Why?
Testing of Earth System Models against paleoclimate proxies is critical for predicting future climate change under scenarios of anthropogenic CO2 increase and global warming. However, these tests are significantly hampered by insufficient proxy resolution, including the concentration of atmospheric mineral dust. Ultimately, this uncertainty may impact mitigation against future hazards.
How?
The Paleocene epoch (66–56 Ma) is optimal as a case study, as it represents higher (but comparable) atmospheric CO2 concentrations and temperatures than modern values. Thus, Paleocene coal material from Svalbard will be analyzed for state-of-the-art organic geochemical and petrographic proxies to produce unrivalled sub-millennial records of dust aerosols, wildfires, precipitation, and much more.