Présentation
Amazon climate and vegetation : past changes, natural variability and oceanic drivers
- Coordination : A. Govin (LSCE) & C.M. Chiessi (USP)
- Coordination LSCE : A. Govin
- Partners : LSCE, Geo-Ocean, USP, UNIFESP, UERJ, UFPR
- LSCE participants : A. Govin, P. Benitez Frometa, P. Brockmann, C. Hatté, G. Hervé, J. Jacob, M. Kageyama, A. Van Toer, C. Wandres, J.W. Yang
- Budget : 534 k€ (ANR)
- Project duration : 2025-2029 (48 months)
The Amazon rainforest hosts the richest terrestrial biodiversity on Earth, is one of the world’s largest surface carbon pools and has historically been a major sink for anthropogenic CO2 emissions. However, land-use and climate changes may force the Amazon into a self-perpetuating dieback process, making it a global core tipping point of the climate system.
The AMACLIM project will use interglacial and millennial-scale climate changes of the last 220,000 years as natural experiments to provide the first integrated understanding of atmosphere-land-ocean interactions that control natural changes in Amazon climate and vegetation under different climatic forcings of the past two glacial cycles. To achieve these objectives, AMACLIM will couple high-resolution paleoclimate reconstructions from two pairs of marine sediment cores collected downstream of the mouth of the Amazon River during the oceanographic cruise AMARYLLIS-AMAGAS II, with state-of-the-art vegetation and climate model simulations of the Amazon. The project will address key questions about how interglacial and millennial timescale changes in the dynamics of the surface, subsurface and deep western equatorial Atlantic influenced the Amazon climate and vegetation, with potentially different impacts in the Andes and lowlands of the Amazon basin.
AMACLIM gathers a unique team of French and Brazilian early-, mid-carrier and senior experts in paleoclimate reconstructions and modelling of the Amazon region, in order to provide the first comprehensive characterization of climatic mechanisms and feedbacks linking the western equatorial Atlantic dynamics and the Amazon climate and vegetation under different climatic conditions. AMACLIM builds on the close French-Brazilian collaboration established in paleoceanography and paleoclimatology through three ongoing scientific initiatives: the AMARYLLIS-AMAGAS II oceanographic cruise and two scientific mobility projects (the IRP-INSU Saravá and CAPES-COFECUB projects).