Dr. Sebastian Breitenbach (Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne)

Deep Into the Continent and Back in Time —Where No One Has Gone Before

Abstract: Continental Eurasia, with its vast permafrost deposits, boreal forests and dryland biomes, is a key regulator of global greenhouse gas dynamics and atmospheric circulation patterns. Despite its rapid response to global warming, reflected in accelerating permafrost thaw, intensifying wildfires, and increasing number of extreme events like droughts and floods, the climatic history of continental Eurasia remains poorly understood, due largely to lack of suitable archives. I will discuss cave deposits as archives for continental palaeoenvironmental changes, present recent results of my team, and challenges when working with speleothems in permafrost regions. Ongoing work reveals environmental changes in Siberia since the Miocene. Using innovative analytical tools like clumped isotopes and biomarkers we gain fresh insights into past temperature, vegetation changes and moisture supply that are intimately linked to circulation dynamics. Going ca. 8.7 million years back in time, we tap into continental climate changes in a warmer-than-modern world, but we also face new challenges that require novel methods and interdisciplinary collaboration.  Linking multi-proxy reconstructions from different archives and model estimates we should be able to estimate near-future scenarios for permafrost, precipitation, and vegetation changes deep in Eurasia and associated repercussions for society.

Vita:  I am Associate Professor at the School of Geography and Natural Sciences at Northumbria University, UK. I studied geography and geology at Humboldt University and FU Berlin, completed my PhD at University Potsdam in 2009. After several years as postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, I became research associate at Cambridge University (2015-2016) and Ruhr-University Bochum (2016-2020). In 2020, I accepted a post as Senior-Vice Chancellor Fellow at Northumbria University. As Head of the Northumbria Isotope and Clumped Geothermometry for Environmental Studies (NICEST) laboratory I exploit diverse carbonate systems, like speleothems, ostracods and molluscs, to reconstruct past environmental changes on the continents. I am particularly interested in the development of quantitative proxies, such as clumped isotopes, and the consequences of climatic changes on society. I am a field-oriented speleothem science expert, and I enjoy working in interdisciplinary research collaborations. 

Invited by: Pavel Tarasaov