The European Geosciences Union conference takes place every year in Vienna. It hosts around 15,000 scientists on all topics to do with geoscience. This year I was invited to take part in one of the daily press conferences they organise. The topic of the press conference was Past civilisational resilience and collapse.
by Brian Dermody
The European Geosciences Union conference takes place every year in Vienna. It hosts around 15,000 scientists on all topics to do with geoscience. This year I was invited to take part in one of the daily press conferences they organise. The topic of the press conference was Past civilisational resilience and collapse.
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My name is Kees Klein Goldewijk and I’ve joined Copernicus as a research fellow last year on a VENI grant from NWO. The topic of my grant is: "Looking back to the future: improving historical land use reconstructions for better understanding of the global carbon cycle". The main research questions are: When did human activities trigger global environmental change at relevant scales? And how did these activities such as settlement strategies and agriculture affect land use and land cover, the global carbon cycle and climate? I’d like to explain in my blog about my project and all the highly interesting problems (and solutions!) I do encounter. Follow me on a epic journey into the past...
Blog entry by Brian Dermody - PhD student What brought about the fall of the Roman Empire? That is a question that has occupied Roman scholars for centuries. An equally important question is what enabled the Roman civilisation to last so long in a region of highly variable climate and dynamic landscapes? Environmental Setting The heart of the Roman Empire was the Mediterranean and its surrounding ecosystems. Much of Mediterranean is marginal for agriculture with low rainfall and highly variable climate making droughts and famine a real and constant threat. Equally, proxy data show that climate in the Mediterranean underwent long-term changes during the lifetime of the Roman Empire (Fig. 1). Land degradation was also a serious problem in the Roman period, particularly with a shift to large-scale farming in the Late Republican period to feed a growing urban populous. The impact of land degradation in Italy was outlined in the writings of Lucretius dating from 99 – 55 BC: |
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Environmental Sciences BlogWritten by the junior researchers, PhD-students and post-docs of the Environmental Sciences group. |