Welcome to PAGES

The PAGES (Past Global Changes) project is an international effort to coordinate and promote past global change research. The primary objective is to improve our understanding of past changes in the Earth system in order to improve projections of future climate and environment, and inform strategies for sustainability. ... more

PAGES, a registered association for scientific research and networking, is open and inclusive to all scientists interested in past global changes. Science within PAGES is conducted by working groups, which are open to all paleoscientists working on the topic. Get involved by contacting the working group leaders, signing up to mailing lists, and attending teleconferences and/or workshops.

In February 2017, PAGES' parent organization Future Earth published a statement affirming its commitment to supporting international collaboration and the free movement of scientists and flow of data, information and knowledge for global sustainability. PAGES fully supports the Future Earth statement.

PAGES is funded by the Swiss Academy of Sciences, and supported in-kind by the University of Bern, Switzerland. For administrative purposes, it is part of the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research (OCCR). PAGES is a Global Research Project of Future Earth, a scientific partner of WCRP, and a partner of WDS-Paleo.

Read the latest e-news

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Published: Wednesday, 14 August 2019 15:05

pages eye logoRead about the latest PAGES' news, meetings and opportunities from around the world in this month's e-news.

Highlights include media interest in the recent PAGES 2k Network papers, the deadline for new working group submissions, many recent products, PAGES working group news and meeting announcements, ECN updates, the IPCC Working Group I survey, call for input at EGU 2020, the new Risk KAN program, and other relevant information.

 

European summer droughts

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Published: Wednesday, 31 July 2019 15:23

euro med2k fig erl 19Researchers from the PAGES 2k Network Euro-Med2k subgroup have published a paper on the association between summer temperature and drought across Europe over both short and long timescales.

Placing recent drought in a 12-century-long perspective, authors identified that throughout history northern Europe tends to get wetter and southern Europe tends to get drier during warmer periods. They also observe that recent changes in drought patterns are not yet unprecedented.

Project leader Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist said these new findings are important as we are able to see for the first time that the relationship between summer temperature and drought seen in modern instrumental measurements has persisted for at least 12 centuries. "We can also see that the 20th century wetter trend in the north and drier trend in the south is not unprecedented over this time perspective," he said.

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International media attention

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Published: Monday, 29 July 2019 16:36

2k gmst fig2 19The two PAGES 2k Network papers published last week in Nature and Nature Geoscience have attracted huge international media interest.

If you couldn't access the actual articles before, they're now publicly available using SharedIt. Click the links above to find the full-text, view-only versions.

Scientists from around the world, many not even involved in the studies, have welcomed the papers' findings.

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Unprecedented warming

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Published: Wednesday, 24 July 2019 19:19

WGLogo2kNetworkTwo new PAGES 2k Network papers, published today in Nature and Nature Geoscience, examine temperature trends over the past two millennia and show that recent warming events are unmatched in the past 2,000 years.

The studies, led by Raphael Neukom, find that the rate and spatial consistency of recent warming is extraordinary in the last 2,000 years and cannot be explained by natural factors alone. During the pre-industrial period, volcanic eruptions were the key driver of global temperature fluctuations.

In "No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the pre-industrial Common Era", published in Nature, authors find that previously named climate epochs of the Common Era were not globally coherent phenomena. This is in contrast to the contemporary anthropogenic warming which we do find is globally coherent to an extent that hasn’t happened in the past 2,000 years.

In "Consistent multidecadal variability in global temperature reconstructions and simulations over the Common Era", published in Nature Geoscience, authors show the most rapid warming of the past 2,000 years occurred during the second half of the 20th century - highlighting the extraordinary character of current climate change, due mostly to human emissions of heat-trapping gases.

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Read the latest e-news

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Published: Wednesday, 17 July 2019 16:18

pages eye logoRead about the latest PAGES' news, meetings and opportunities from around the world in this month's e-news.

Highlights include details of the new ACME working group, the call for new working groups, submit abstracts by 31 July to four PAGES sessions at the AGU in December, many recent products, PAGES working group news and meeting announcements, ECN updates, and other relevant information.

 

More Articles ...

  1. Historical climatology paper
  2. New ACME working group
  3. Climate and cave drip water
  4. Spanish funding success
  5. Read the latest e-news