We investigate climate change in the geological and historical past and its impacts on the human habitat as well as past changes in the Earth’s magnetic field. Main foci of our research are particularly rapid climate changes that occurred within a few years or decades. Therefore, we exploit high-resolution terrestrial geo-archives as annually laminated (varved) lake sediments and tree rings. A crucial part of our approach is to date precisely and accurately our archives as main prerequisite for robust reconstructions of changes in the past.

Rapid climate changes in the past are considered natural experiments that enable us to gain deep insights into the causes and dynamics of such changes in order to be better prepared to future developments. Therefore, we use structure and chemical composition of seasonal layers (proxy data) that we calibrate with instrumental observation (monitoring). Our vision is to integrate long time series obtained from our high-resolution geo-archives and instrumental data to assessing present-day changes in a long-term context.