Past Climates: Icehouse to Greenhouse (ERTH20003)

This subject explores the Earth’s past and present climates, from billion year to hundred year time scales. The subject also deals with the wide range of causes of past climates and of climate change. Climate episodes discussed may include: Precambrian Snowball Earth, Gondwanan Glaciations, the Mesozoic Hothouse, global cooling over the last 20 million years and increasing aridity in Australia over the last 5 million years. The subject also covers the record of regular Ice Age cycles, abrupt climate change, global and regional climate variability of the past 1000 years, and natural and human factors contributing to modern climate change. We use climate ‘proxy’ records such as ice cores, tree rings, corals, sedimentary records and historical documents to identify more recent changes in the Australian region.